Just tune in to Twitter and you find the place buzzing with news that Google.co.jp was penalized for paying for blogger reviews. Matt Cutts was the one who twittered:
Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.â€
According to Google Blogoscoped
Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog recently reported that Google Japan was paying bloggers to review a new Google widget. Using pay-per-post service CyberBuzz, blog posts like the following popped up, strangely resembling each other, as Asiajin reports
Now Google Japan issued an apology:
“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.â€
Here is the reply from Matt Cutts on this penalty : “I expect that to remain for a while.â€
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Navneet Kaushal, CEO PageTraffic is a trusted authority in the search engine marketing industry. He is a featured author at Web Pro News, Search Newz, Website Notes, DevWebPro, SEO Article and Web Help Now among many others.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Crazy! You’d think Google Japan employees would know their own guidelines!
I suspect they hired a third party company (to carry out the widget promotion) who didn’t do their research into who they were working for!
Is that even possible ?? I mean Google.jp is Google’s, or istn’t it? Strange .. reaally strane ??