Pointers for Google Japan paid-post story

News from Google

I just did a joint post about the Google Japan issue on Google’s Japanese webmaster blog. There’s also a post on Google’s main Japanese blog. If you don’t read Japanese, you can also watch the video where I recently talked about this.

To the extent that I can speak on behalf of Google, I apologize that this happened. One of the messages I heard was that people wanted Google to take action in this instance, and we did. The toolbar PageRank for google.co.jp dropped from 9 to 5, and I expect that to stay for a while. That decrease in PageRank reflects a loss of trust in the google.co.jp domain. In addition, the PageRank change also has ripple effects for google.co.jp where we lose trust in the links for that domain. The team from google.co.jp will also need to submit a reconsideration request just like anyone else would.

One of the other messages I’m hearing is that Google needs to keep talking about these issues, especially to explain why we think paid posts that affect search engines are bad for the ecology of the web. But in the mean time, I wanted to provide the pointers to the Japanese posts and to the video about this.

www.mattcutts.com

published @ February 20, 2009