Google Inc. (NDAQ: GOOG) has announced it will sell a branch of recently acquired DoubleClick called Performics – a marketing firm that helps websites increase their ranking on search engines.

Facing an obvious question about conflict of interest – because Performics tries to increase rankings most prominently on Google's own search engine – the decision should help silence at least some possible concerns. Performics is a small wing of DoubleClick, which Google finalized purchasing three weeks ago for $3.2 billion.

Facing prickly questions about possible conflicts of interest, Google Inc. will sell a recently acquired service called Performics that helps Web sites improve their ranking on online search engines, including Google's.

"It's clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business," said Tom Phillips, who oversaw the DoubleClick purchase, wrote in a Google blog. "Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google's mission."

The decision, announced Wednesday, comes three weeks after Google picked up Performics as part of the online search leader's $3.2 billion purchase of online ad service DoubleClick. Performics has about 200 of DoubleClick's 1,500 total staff.

In other housecleaning measures, Google is also planning to layoff 300 employees, according to much cited unnamed sources, These employees are presumably redundancies created from the DoubleClick deal – this would be the biggest loss of employees in the company's 10 year history. These layoffs are not unexpected as CEO Eric Schmidt acknowledged their possibility in documents published at the close of the DoubleClick deal.

Given Google's exponential growth – it now has more than 18,000 employees – a loss of 300 jobs is not materially significant, but it does perhaps signal the end of the company's era of unfettered financial and hiring growth. Such 'cutting of the fat' is seen by many analysts as online advertising, which drives Google's profits, comes to plateau for the foreseeable future. Google's stock has lost about a third of its value this year.

Hopefully these decisions signal a conscious and thorough effort by Google to improve its bottom-line by carefully examining all its businesses rather than relying solely on ad revenue growth.

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