Google.co.jp penalized for buying links

Matt Cutts twittered that Google.co.jp was penalized for paying for blogger reviews. If you look at the FriendFeed details, you will see Matt first said, “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.” And then when he was questioned if this was a paid link penalty, he said “yes.”

Google Blogoscoped has more details about the why with their story named Google Japan Reportedly Bought Blog Posts in Promotion Campaign, Now Issued Apology.

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.

The Google Japan blog’s apology translated into:

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.

How long will this PageRank penalty last? Matt Cutts of Google said, “I expect that to remain for a while.” Any takers on what “a while” means?

Text taken from
http://searchengineland.com/google-penalizes-google-japan-16541

Remember play fair.

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