On Monday, we covered an embarrassing pay-per-post campaign Google launched in Japan with the aim of boosting awareness of a new keyword hitlist box on the Google Japan top page. It now turns out the move, which was (to my knowledge) first brought to light by Japanese super bloggers Masato Kogure and Akky Akimoto, triggered a number of repercussions.
The aftermath in a nutshell: The campaign is now stopped, Google is embarrassed, apologizes and penalizes the Japanese site with a PageRank reduction.
Just a few hours after the Japanese version of the TechCrunch article went online Tuesday, Google Japan issued a half-baked, vague apology on the official Google Japan blog, basically saying the Japanese subsidiary was unaware of their own terms of service. The campaign was halted and Google Japan ordered their outside PR agency to remove all existing paid postings in question.
An email Google Japan sent out to bloggers asking for a comment states the following (the second half of the last sentence is a winner):
Our internal guidelines have been violated in two ways:
First, the blog posts were connected to Google (via the outside agency which we contracted), but failed to fully disclose that relationship. Our internal guidelines are committed to transparency, and this was not sufficiently transparent.Second, we have strict rules against doing anything that would
artificially promote the ranking of our own sites — or even be
perceived as artificially promoting their ranking. Having outside
blogs write about our gadget and linking to our site may have had an
impact on our own ranking, which is not acceptable under our
guidelines.At Google, we believe in being open and transparent with our users,
and do not condone these kinds of opaque communications. We would
like to apologize for this episode, and express our gratitude to the
community of users and bloggers who brought this to our attention so
that we could put a stop to it.
But the apologies obviously weren’t enough as Google has imposed a PageRank penalty upon itself, busting down the rank from 9 to 5 (Google.com has a PageRank of 10, while TechCrunch still stands at 8). Matt Cutts, head of Google’s anti web spam team, tweeted that he expects Google Japan’s lower rank to remain as is for a while.
Considering that Google stopped the campaign after a little more than 24 hours, the funding was openly acknowledged in the posts and apologies were issued, the self punishment may appear a bit too harsh at first sight. But Google is actually just replicating a punishment strategy it pursued against other sites that violated company policies in the past (Google Japan’s PageRank hasn’t been reset to zero, however).
I doubt Google will lose any significant search traffic in Japan in the process, but think the measure is better than no measure at all. It should be OK now anyway as the company has been heavily scoffed at in the last few days and will probably have to live with a damage to its image for a while. But it’s Google, after all, and worse things than this PR meltdown could have happened.
This was truly an evil act on the part of Google.
I think more atoning is required here.
Anjali Sen
Definitely! If one of us tried something like that with our blogs/sites, we wouldn’t get a 4 point PR reduction, we’d more than likely be banned from search results altogether.
It’s not even atoning.
It’s not as if people go on Google to search for Google.co,jp. So this atonement makes no difference whatsoever.
This is just PR. A real atonement would something like donating all the ad revenues from Google.co.jp for a day to a charity promoting education in rural India.
This is just a joke.
Anjali Sen
what are you smoking currently?
Hah hah hah! Self-demotion…I love it!
While I think that this move sends the right message, I’m a bit unclear of what effect it will have. Wouldn’t it only affect people looking for Google… on Google?
LOL. What kind of credentials do you need to be called a “super blogger”? And how many levels is that below “double super secret blogger”?
I was wondering about that myself.
is there some type of reality competition in Japan for “super blogger” status?
ha ha this is crazy .
For me google shows signs of a Microsoft-yahoo flavour in there recent monetization communist initiatives in ISP cacheing, youtube downloads, and know this.
I jumped all over yahoo with the whole Icahn thing, thinking yahoo lacked vision; but google looks like they are floundering from the opensource brand flavour that has been there whole brand embodiment.
Google has become so big it can’t manage itself!
I agree with you. With the size of google, it’s always likely that someone somewhere in one of their branches will screw up. But tell you the truth, google is doing a great job thus far.
not a great week for google
what an idiot move to drop google’s japan portal
what do they wanna prove?
google will learn from its mistakes
This proofs that buying links is hotter than ever. They cannot even detect their own stuff and people had to tell them. Google.jp also still ranks and gets tons of traffic.
Smart move deducting the Page Rank otherwise they were about to be sued in a class action suit by all the Pay Per Post bloggers that had there blogs Page Rank reduced and there blogs removed from the search index.
2009 doesn’t seem like a good year for Google!!
Sad. For most Googlers, Tokyo used to be one of the better places to get demoted. I guess that’s going to change from now.
Google is runned by a huge organization from different countries so it doesn’t surprise me that sometimes they can make mistakes. Its called being a company.
I think the best part is that Google still stands by it’s own terms and still penalized Google Japan for that manner.
This just shows that they don’t want the “cool” strategies to be used by there competitors bloody bastards, will the page rank deduction of the google japan site really matter ? don’t think so !
Goooooooooooogle deserved it.
Eso le pasa por querer ser el monopolizador de la web, lo tiene bien merecido, no sabe como dominar el mercado japones, y asi como sucede en japon ojala suceda en otros paises
Artificially manipulating Google’s own subsidiary PageRank so that its HQ can show the world that it is one and only dictator of all the Web. To avoid that, Google JP should go financially independent via e.g. MBO against the HQ.
google is the best search engine forever !
Cheap publicity stunt by Google!
like this one http://reviewbo...t-in-india.html
Google spending lots of money for branding and marketing lately
Page Rank only matters when people are trying to access the site by searching for a term in Google. How many people access google.jp by searching for this term in Google itself? I’m guessing when someone from JP tries to access Google, he is automatically forwarded to Google.co.jp. So this move of lowering pagerank sounds like another cheap PR stunt by Google.