It’s a welcome sight to see Google upholding the “do as I say and not as I do” philosophy of search engine optimisation [SEO] best practices. After news of Google Japan being caught paying for blogger reviews in an attempt to improve their PageRank position they announced that Google.co.jp PageRank was now ~5 instead of ~9.
It is hard to miss the irony of the situation that an arm of Google has broken the rules that the main body has set. The news could be construed as interesting as it is in country where Google is in an unfamiliar position of being number two in the search engine rankings. They currently rank second to Yahoo Japan who have a market share of 51.2% up to September last year.
A cynic might say that Google would start bending the rules to suit themselves as long as they didn’t get caught in an attempt to obtain the number one ranking in Japan. I would like to believe that this is just a case of the good people of Google Japan getting as confused as the rest of us in relation to what can work for improving a PageRank position.
It is nice to see that Google have acted accordingly and as swiftly in their punishment of themselves as they would any other site on the internet. Apologies were offered by people at Google Japan and the practice was stopped immediately.
This situation also goes some way to explaining how different the web community is. Despite it seeming as though it’s all starting to become the same worldwide with such powerful companies leading the way there are obviously still different practices that are generally acceptable in different countries.
In a way I find this kind of reassuring that pay-per-posts may be a common practice in Japan and not in the west. It makes sure that any company wanting to be successful in that market will have to spend the time doing their research to find out how to succeed there. Much like they would have done before the internet made the world so much smaller and has helped to turn country’s businesses into clones of each other.
This partly emphasises the need to be prepared to use a well informed and reliable multi lingual SEO company when considering setting your website up for business in a foreign country.
I feel that it’s good that Google is on top of these things and that they are not exempt from their own rules but a little part of me likes the idiosyncrasies of different working customs on the internet still existing today.
