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:
“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.”
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.
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Google is always unfair.
Nice to see Google caught violating their own rules.
they stopped cause they were found out…
So much for pride. Haha.
I love Google – still.
Looks like Google needs to tighten some loose bolts.
and this is the company that has “don’t be evil” as its official mantra
Ginisa si google sa sarili nyang mantika, hehe!
google pa rin ako kahit anong mangyari!hehe
What’s next?! LOL!
Lungkot naman, Google cannot stick to their own rules… Pero kuntento na ako sa Google.
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.
And they’re penalizing our Page Ranks and deindexing our blogs because of paid posts, yet all along they were the scumbags.
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.