Google caught doing paid post in Japan

Google was doing some marketing campaign in Japan thru an agency called CyberBuzz and paying bloggers to post about Google Widgets.

TechCrunch picked up the story initially reported by Asiajin.

Paid reviews and link buying is a practice Google itself discourages so it’s a little confusing why Google would use the same tactics that it openly disapprove.

Hours after being outed, Baba Yasutsugu posted as response on the official Google Japan blog:

â€œGoogle 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.â€

Apparently, Google is trailing behind Yahoo! in Japan — just 39%, way below Yahoo’s 51.2% market share. This paid review campaign may just be one of Google’s efforts to gain more users in Japan. Too bad they got caught.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

14 Comments

dan says:

16 years ago

too bad for google as they themselves put up a policy against it but come to think of it, in traditional advertising, advertorials are not bad at all.
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Ferdielicious says:

16 years ago

And they’re penalizing our Page Ranks and deindexing our blogs because of paid posts, yet all along they were the scumbags.
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edelweiza says:

16 years ago

i have always loved google. this news is disturbing, i thought they walk what they talk.well at least they corrected it before it became unmanageable.
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Taong Bahay says:

16 years ago

Lungkot naman, Google cannot stick to their own rules… Pero kuntento na ako sa Google.
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Kenneth says:

16 years ago

What’s next?! LOL!
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kill3rfill3r says:

16 years ago

google pa rin ako kahit anong mangyari!hehe
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Daddy Mike says:

16 years ago

Ginisa si google sa sarili nyang mantika, hehe!
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manilenio says:

16 years ago

and this is the company that has “don’t be evil” as its official mantra
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Productive Pinoy says:

16 years ago

Looks like Google needs to tighten some loose bolts.
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TechPinas says:

16 years ago

So much for pride. Haha. :) I love Google – still.
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Andre Marcelo-Tanner says:

16 years ago

they stopped cause they were found out…
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Eligio says:

16 years ago

Nice to see Google caught violating their own rules. :D
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Jam says:

16 years ago

Google is always unfair.
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