Google Japan Apologizes For Inappropriate Pay Per Post Use

About Google's Marketing Activities - Google Japan Blog

Under the name of the Senior Marketing Manager Koji Baba, they announced on their official blog,


"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."

As you can see, it does not link to any other blogs or news items, such as our report or TechCrunch's follow-up ( I'm guessing that TechCrunch Japan's translated article is the direct cause for this apology.) So we cannot see "which activities" were violated nor how they will be fixed. How transparent!

See Also:

Google Japan Buys Dirty Pay-Per-Post Links | Asiajin

(Proofread by Sean O'Hagan)


Author Information  @akky(Akky AKIMOTO) is one of the first pro-bloggers in Japan [J]. He also leads Asiajin, writes for Japan Times, does consultation for foreign companies interested in entering Japanese web market.


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