Google Blogoscoped

Forum

Google Japan Buys Dirty Pay-Per-Post Links  (View post)

Gen Kanai [PersonRank 1]

Monday, February 9, 2009
15 years ago12,305 views

Asiajin is criticizing Google Japan for putting keywords on the homepage of google Japan that are tied to a pay-per-post SEO service called CyberBuzz.

http://asiajin.com/blog/2009/02/09/google-japan-buys-dirty-pay-per-post-links/

Gen Kanai [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Apologies, my mistake. Google is accused of buying links on other blogs.

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

The post is completely out of place. The service linked from Google Japan's homepage is similar to Google Hot Trends, a service launched in 2007 for the US and India.

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
http://www.google.com/trends

Google shows the top results for the "hot" keywords in Google News, Blog Search and Web Search to help you explain why the keywords are suddenly popular. Of course, many sites saw this as an opportunity to gain page views by writing posts related to those keywords. Some posts are created automatically, while others are created manually. Google should improve the algorithms and filter the spam posts, but that has nothing to do with pay-per-post and the other accusations.

Grega M [PersonRank 2]

15 years ago #

But this does:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/09/pay-per-post-google-uses-every-trick-to-beat-yahoo-in-japan/

Gen Kanai [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Google Japan has apologized and has stopped this promotion. I'm not going to translate this but you can use various translation services to see that Google has indeed apologized and has stopped funding this pay-per-post scheme.

http://googlejapan.blogspot.com/2009/02/google.html

Gen Kanai [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Ionut Alex, you said, "The post is completely out of place."

Do you now acknowledge that you did not know what you were talking about? Do you acknowledge what Google is doing in Japan is not the same as what Google is doing elsewhere?

Yv. [PersonRank 7]

15 years ago #

Translation of googlejapan blog:
http://asiajin.com/blog/2009/02/10/google-japan-apologizes-for-inappropriate-pay-per-post-use/

Above 7 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

samblackjack [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Phillip, you should be getting a fat check from Google.

drtimofey [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Who knows, maybe an apology was just another part of the campaign.

John Honeck [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Amazing.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Matt Cutts sez:

<< Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while. >>

Via: http://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/1200910626

Gen Kanai [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Oh its getting worse:

Matt Cutts says, "my team isn't 100% done with the investigation on our side, but I would expect us to take action on this, not just apologize."

http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/1200074346

beussery [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

BRAVO! This is a great illustration and example for folks who still aren't certain about how Google really handles paid links passing PageRank...

Matt Cutts [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Gen Kanai, that "my team isn't 100% done" was done around noon, and the PageRank decrease was visible to the world afterwards, around 2pm or so.

Gen Kanai [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Matt Cutts, thank you for the clarification and thanks for your team's transparency and keeping all sites, even Google's own, to the same standards that we all are working to abide by.

olegd [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

What exactly does this penalty accomplish? It's not like people often use google to find google. Even then, searching for "Google Japan" gives google.co.jp as the first result.

Franta H. [PersonRank 6]

15 years ago #

[put at-character here]olegd
Exactly, I don't think they would do this if it significantly affected number of Google visitors. The reason why they lowered the PageRank is because they want to keep their 'We are not evil' image.

Veky [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

The reason they lowered the PageRank is the same reason they always do... google.co.jp just lost quite a bit of powerful inbound links, when they were devalued in the graph because they were discovered to have been paid for.

And besides, what exactly _would_ you want them to do? It is _you_ who wanted Google to treat google.co.jp the _same_ as other sites that buy links (although it was obvious that it accomplishes very little). Now they do, you're not satisfied, and point out that google.co.jp is _not_ the same as other sites. :-)

Danny Sullivan [PersonRank 2]

15 years ago #

Philipp, I added some of my thoughts on the situation to our own post about what happened over at Search Engine Land:
http://searchengineland.com/google-penalizes-google-japan-16541

That also notes that this isn't the first time Google has penalized itself. When some Google pages were found to be cloaking Google's spider, it pulled those pages and had the team involved file a reinclusion request.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Agree with Veky – a neutral penalty should not be concerned about "what it does" to the site in detail, as long as the penalty is the same for everyone. And while you may argue that people may not search for "google" so much (though surprisingly such searches actually do pop up a lot in search engines... check the AOL search leak, where the #1 AOL search query was "google", in a search engine powered by Google!), keep in mind that Google Japan's homepage may pass PageRank to the sub-services it links to. A penalty of the homepage may this way indirectly affect the ranking of the sub-services, if it remains up for some time.

Yv. [PersonRank 7]

15 years ago #

I thought only sites that sold pagerank could get a PR penalty? Is this the first site to get a penalty (whatever that actually means in this case) for buying textlinks?

JIM [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

oh wow...big deal....PR 5 instead of 9....wow....great one mr.cutts....what kind of message this sends to all those big corporation out there who don't give a crap about pagerank (because we all know this is a bogus number anyway)...buy links! the only things that can happen to you is that you're going to loose some PR...no ban,no nothing else,just less PR...

Andrew [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

Seems like a strong message to me, and smart as well.

Someone screwed up. Someone else in Google called them on it. Apology was issued, and appropriate corrective action taken (ask Veky points out).

We can argue about whether this is a 8 out of 10 on the "well done" scale or a 7 or even a 9. But anyway, it's good.

Jhangora [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

Now I shud not worry about writing sponsored posts on my blog :)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Google Japan posted another entry on the issue, mentioning the PageRank-downsizing they received:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgooglejapan.blogspot.com%2F2009%2F02%2Fgooglecojp.html

Forum home

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!