After Linkpurchase, Google.co.jp now down to PageRank 5

Johannes Beus
Once you are used to the marketshare of searchengines from Germany or Europe, it might become necessary to read some passages twice when you look at the bigger picture. In Japan, for example, it is the case that Yahoo is market leader by a wide margin which leaves Google with the second place. Seeing how they have to put in some more effort in Japan, they will get some nice gimmicks from time to time which would probably not have been developed for a market with 90 percent marketshare.

One of them is called “Hot Keywords” and shows the top 5 most searched for keywords of the last 24 hours on the startpage of Google Japan. To promote this feature, Google Japan used a service called “CyberBuzz”. Ultimately something like Tribgami; Bloggers write paid blogentries about the desired topic. This, however, led Google to be at a loss for words: on the one hand they are trying to educate websiteoperators that bought links are absolutely evil and on the other hand they are using such methods themselves. Thanks to this, Google Japan had to make an apology via blog a few days ago: They had noticed that these blogentries were against the Google-Webmaster-Guidelines and the collaboration was terminated. And that was it?

Well, the topic was hotly discussed in the English SEO-blog-scene: why should Google fail to hold itself up to the same standards by which they are measuring other websites? It seems that this reasoning has made its way to Matt Cutts who then announced via Twitter: “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.”
Johannes Beus - on Thu (02/12/2009) at 08:45 AM

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