Google “Google-Slaps” Google Japan
Posted Friday, February 13th, 2009 by Mike Pantoliano, in Search Engine Marketing
For the search engine marketer, one strategy that often comes into question is the buying and selling of links. As amassing more backlinks plays a huge part in a website’s search rankings, the process of link building has become a considerable part of the search engine marketer’s repertoire. Google has long stated that buying and selling links are against their regulations, and websites that are discovered doing so risk being banned. But what happens when the blogosphere discovers that Google itself is buying links?
With a gigantic 80% of the global market share according to Net Applications, its easy to forget that there are some areas of the world where Google is not king. For instance, Russia and South Korea use Yandex and Naver as their respective top search engines.
The same goes for Japan, where Yahoo leads the way with 51% of the market share, with Google coming in at second with around 39% of the share. In an effort to overtake Yahoo, Google Japan has engaged in some shady practices. On Monday, the Asiajin blog reported that Google Japan was making use of the Pay-Per-Post service known as CyberBuzz to promote one of their new web gadgets. The service pays bloggers to write glowing reviews and link to a product, essentially creating fake buzz around the net.
After making the rounds and being substantiated around the net, one was left to wonder if Google would punish Google, and how this would even be possible. After all, about a year ago, Google essentially removed any blogs that utilized the pay-per-post system from their index.
On Wednesday night Matt Cutts used Twitter to state that Google Japan had been penalized for buying links by dropping their PageRank from a 9 to a 5. He added, “I expect that to remain for a while.”
My immediate question was, So What? PageRank’s overall importance in the Google Search Algorithm has been downgraded substantially since the early days. And even if it was as important as it once was, so Google Japan will now rank lower when one searches for “Search Engine”? I don’t have the numbers, but I’m sure a vast majority of Yahoo and Google traffic is via direct type-in or bookmark traffic.
Ultimately my guess is that if anything is effected by the PageRank change, it will be Google’s secondary services like Gmail, News, Chrome, Maps, etc. These are the services that probably see a good deal of search referral traffic, and being a subset of the parent google.co.jp domain, their trust level will decrease, and appear lower when one searches for “maps” or “news”.
But wait, the absurdity of the whole thing rears its ugly head again when you consider that PageRank is a Google formula, affecting only Google and its search networks. So these secondary services will appear lower only in Google’s own search results. This might be effective, if it weren’t for the fact that the programs are already advertised on the home page and within sponsored search results anyway.
Make no mistake, a PageRank drop from 9 to 5 would be devastating to an eCommerce store. So by slapping Google Japan for buying links, Google is setting an example: do not buy links. Unfortunately, I doubt a PageRank slap will have nearly as much effect on Google Japan as it would for any other normal website. While I’m not sure what they could have done to truly appease the masses, this was simply a PR move for Google (and I don’t mean PageRank).
