In Dec 2007, Google’s Matt Cutts drew attention to the significance of paid links within blog posts. In a concrete example of search engines’ prerogative to remain impartial, Matt Cutts outlined the derogative affect paid posts have on search results by using the search term ‘radio surgery’. The paid posts brought back ranged from car loans to colon cleansing, highlighting the irrelevance of paid posts within a serious subject matter.
The scary thing to consider is that people actually sat down and made a conscious decision to target the keyword without providing any information on the subject of ‘radio surgery’ which is more than likely going to be utilised by someone researching the treatment of cancer. The post was approved by Google’s PR department and seemed to be a clear statement of Google’s intention to remain impartial in the face of money mad evil corporations… but was it?
Apparently much changes in 14 months, as a blogs have been lit up by chatter about Google’s shenanigans Japan. Google Japan have been marketing a new keyword widget in Japan and Asiajin blog reported that many of the blog posts looked remarkably similar. After further investigation it was apparent that the postings were part of a CyberBuzz campaign.
CyberBuzz is one of the busiest pay-per-post agencies in Japan and provide a service where they pay for blog posts which contain ad links at the foot of the post. Google have already posted an apology about this promising to be ‘more transparent’. The multi-billion dollar question still remains, why would Google use a practice in Japan that they outright condemned in the US?
The concise apology from Google Japan stated, ‘It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines,…’. Although this is a translation from Japanese, I would hope that Google might know their own basic search guidelines a bit better than, ‘it turns out…’. Perhaps Google had completely outsourced the marketing of the widget to a third party, or a rogue member of staff took the law into their own hands.
There was no transparency in the apology to allude to why this happened and there have been no other reports regarding any other breaches in Google’s own search guidelines. This could pass as an isolated incidence however with Google maturing increasingly into a streamlined profit machine, further from its innovative origins and into the hands of shareholders, the web holds its breath.
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