WatBlog Newsletter Archive: WATBlog Update "When Google Slapped Google" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

WATBlog Update "When Google Slapped Google" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"When Google Slapped Google" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

When Google Slapped Google

Talk about parenting online. Google Inc. has put a page rank penalty on Google Japan from a PR of 9 to 5 for paying bloggers to promote one of their products. Google Japan hired Cyberbuzz, a Tokyo-based web marketing company to promote a widget feature launched by Google Japan with a pay-per-post campaign. Google for the record trails behind Yahoo in Japan as the country’s leading search engine.

Following reports that came out about this marketing initiative, the father Google penalized Google Japan and reduced its page rank. Matt Cutts tweeted that Google.co.jp was penalized for paying for blogger reviews and that its page rank has been reduced from 9 to 5. So Google.co.jp these days isn’t a very highly recommended site these days for Google’s crawlers.

However, Google Japan has issued an apology with regards to the matter, which translates as:

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.

(Source)

Google has been running a crusade against paid blog posts since before the fall of 2007 and its bulk penalization of a lot of major blogs had caused a minor revolt online against the search engine major. The problem lay in the fact that these paid posts were part of a strategy to build links and thereby alter search relevancy of Google. On one hand we had bloggers who had begunt o make a decent living out of such posts while on the other Google felt its integrity in bringing the most relevant results were being tampered with by such posts. In the end Google won the battle with most bloggers putting a hold on paid links on their blogs to maintain their page rank and Advertisers also backing out of pay per post campaigns.

In a way this can seem as a good corporate branding exercise on Google’s part to show that not even Google can escape the rules of Google.