Google Japan Got Penalized by Google!
Google Japan’s PR has come down to 5 from usual 9. But Why? Google has penalized Google Japan for running pay-per-post campaigns to promote their product. Google Japan is fighting hard to dislodge Yahoo as the no.1 search engine in Japan. Japan’s blogosphere was filled with reports that Google hired Cyberbuzz, a Tokyo-based internet marketing company to promote their Hot Keywords Widget as per per post basis. You can read TechCrunch & Asiajin’s follow ups on this.
Soon Google Japan apologized:
Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.
It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.
And now its PageRank is down to 5. Here is what Matt Cutts said about the penalty in Twitter:
Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.
So Google penalized itself for paying for blogger reviews. That’s bizarre.
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