Google punishes Google
By Pulkit Sharma

The Google search engine dominates most of the world, including India.  But it is still not the market leader in countries like Japan, China, Korea and Brazil.

Google is very strict about being fair in presenting search results to the public.  Anyone caught gaming Google searches to get prominent coverage may be banned by Google.  After all, this Google credibility for being an honest and fair search engine is what earns it most of its revenue in the form of advertising.  The theory is that a good popular product by a small company in Bangalore has the same chances of appearing in a Google search as a lesser popular mid sized company in Kerala.  But there are tricks to ensure one gets favorable ranking.

Last week we had reported on how Google Japan, in its quest to overtake Yahoo in that country has used unethical techniques to sell its products.  Google Japan hired a Pay-per-post company CyberBuzz which pays as much as $100 ‘compensation’ to bloggers to post ‘positive’ stories.  Google was violating its own rules to promote itself.  Any other website doing the same on Google was punished.

Once the media picked up the story, a chastened Google Japan admitted its mistake and apologized.

Google USA was insistent that Google Japan not be treated any differently to other erring websites.  Google USA announced that Google Japan (Google.co.jp) Page Rank was dropped from 9 to 5.

Google has a Page Rank for every website in the world. Put simply, a Page Rank is Google’s way (using complex algorithms) to rank the relative importance of every website.  This is one of the factors in presenting websites/pages to users who search Google.

How effective is this as a real punishment?  No one is really sure because this only means that if you search for Google Japan on Google.com it may (?) get a lower ranking.  The punishment seems more symbolic than real.

While researching this article, noticed that Google had dropped the Page Ranking of its subsidiaries in other countries as well.  While Google.com (USA) has the top Page Rank of 10, Google India, Ireland and Spain have a Page Rank of only 7.  India’s Page Rank has actually fallen. Google China and Google Canada are only 8.

Interesting is it not?

(Techgoss had run the following story on Feb 11, 2009)

Google stops $ for blogs
By Pulkit Sharma

The Google search engine dominates most of the world, including India.  But it is still not the market leader in countries like Japan, China, Korea and Brazil.

Google is very strict about being fair in presenting search results to the public.  Anyone caught gaming Google searches to get prominent coverage may be banned by Google.  After all, this Google credibility for being an honest and fair search engine is what earns it most of its revenue in the form of advertising.  The theory is that a good product by a small company in Bangalore has the same chances of appearing in a Google search as a mid sized company in Kerala.  But there are tricks to ensure one gets favorable ranking.

But now it seems that Google Japan, in its quest to overtake Yahoo in that country has used unethical techniques to sell its products.  Google Japan hired a Pay-per-post company CyberBuzz which pays as much as $100 ‘compensation’ to bloggers to post ‘positive’ stories.

Asiajin is reporting that recently, Google Japan announced a top-page redesign on their official blog, in which they added a “Google Kyuujyoushou Waado (Hot Keywords)” feature. This addition displays the 5 most searched-for keywords in the previous 24 hours. Google Japan planned the new feature to help with their tough search-share fight against nemesis Yahoo! Japan. At the same time, there are a number of blog entries on Google’s blog widget (called “blog parts” in Japanese) reviewing this “Hot Keywords” feature, all of them strangely resembling each other. When you search for “Google Hot Keywords Ranking” + “Blog Widget” + “CyberBuzz” in Japanese on Google Blog Search, you will see over 30 posts by bloggers writing about this new service, saying things like “I’m a part of the CyberBuzz campaign” or “You can earn some money by writing interesting stories provided by CyberBuzz”.

So Google Blog Search, which has been spammed for so long, is now spamming itself in Japan.

Soon after the Asiajin report was picked up by American and European media that Google was fiddling with its own search engine to give itself more favorable attention and consequently more revenue, all hell broke lose.  The Indian tech media has largely ignored this piece of news.

Google Japan has backtracked and now apologized.  Google Japan says they have realized they are ‘violating their own guidelines’ and promise to be ‘more transparent in the future to prevent recurrence of this incident’

If it was anyone else, they would have been banned by Google.