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:

“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.