Jaws dropped last week upon the news Google penalized its own Japanese site in Google search results after discovering Google Japan participated in a pay-per-post blogging scheme. Murdok Video caught up with Google’s anti-spam-team captain, Matt Cutts, who offers his apologies.
“Certainly there were a lot of angry, upset, disappointed people within Google,” Cutts said about the situation, which led to Google Japan dropping from a PageRank 9 to a PageRank 5, the first time Google has ever had to penalize itself for violating its own terms of service.
“Speaking for me personally, I was mortified. I was just very, very upset about it. To the extent I can personally apologize, I do apologize for the fact that this happened.”
Google Japan hired a Japanese company called Cyberbuzz, who paid bloggers as much as $100 to write about a new search widget. This was a clear violation of Google’s rules, which Google has aggressively and publicly enforced over the past couple of years, much to many directory operators’ chagrins.
“We’re contacting all these bloggers and asking them remove the paid posts,” said Cutts. “We do think that paid posts and those sorts of things are bad because they lead to people writing about things they wouldn’t write about normally. And they can affect search engines in a negative way.”
Cutts pointed a finger directly at the marketing at Google Japan, which issued its own apology last week and, judging from the language, was unaware of Google’s stance against paid posts.
Cutts reiterated Google’s stance on paid links and said the company’s position hadn’t changed. “We thought our position [was] clear, we [didn’t] need to reiterate, and I think part of the message is that maybe we do need to every so often just repeat [why we think paid posts are bad.]”
“This is something where we should have done better,” he said.
