Newsday.com has only itself to blame for its PageRank woes, according to Google, which publicly warned the publisher about the practice of selling links.

The issue first came to light when Brent Payne, the SEO manager for Newsday parent company Tribune, turned to Google's Webmaster Help Group to find out why the site's PageRank had been fluctuating.

Payne's post prompted a handful of responses from the webmaster community and a rather ominous warning from Google.

"Please remember that participating in link schemes intended to manipulate search engine rankings, including buying or selling links that pass PageRank, is a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, and may impact your site's standing in Google," a Google employee wrote in response.

At issue may have been a section near the bottom of Newsday's page that read "Featured Links." Those links routed users to lawyers specializing in mesothelioma cases, baseball tickets and local travel opportunities.

While Google stopped short of accusing Newsday or Tribune of any specific wrongdoing, Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, which first broke the story, stated that this may have been the first time that Google has ever called out a major publisher with respect to paid links.

Google, which has long been an opponent of paid links, ramped up its efforts to curb the practice last October. Since then, some webmasters have reported that their PageRanks -- unofficial shorthand for a site's popularity -- have dropped. But Google maintains that its war on paid links is part of its larger attempt to reward publishers that produce unique content and disenfranchise those that buy their traffic through side deals.