Recently, Google was obliged to disregard all its pride and issue a penalty towards Google Japan. We are aware that Google is robustly not in favor of paid links. Unexpectedly, Google Japan was lately discovered for availing paid blog posts as a component of a promotional operation for a latest service.

Based upon Google Blogoscoped, Google Japan was compensating bloggers to assess a latest Google widget via pay-per-post assistance named Cyberbuzz. The content was written by Akky Akimoto on Asiajin blog.

According to her, the articles appear like the regular contents although containing ad tags that are delicate and unnoticeable by the readers. The ad tags were misunderstood and those are in fact article-type advertisements.

Subsequently, Google issued an apology relating that Google Japan is simply undergoing quite a few promotional activities in order to inform the public about their latest products. The employment of blogs as an element of promotional operations violated the search guidelines of Google which lead to the closure of the promotion. They uttered their apologies to the persons and users concerned with the issue.

Matt Cutts was ashamed about the occurrence and said that Google’s stand on paid links has remained. Google is requesting the bloggers to delete their paid posts in order to settle the issue.

Tags: cyberbuzz, Google, google japan, paid blog posts, paid links

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.