Online Marketing at its Worst

Google has made no secret about its feelings towards paid link building, openly attacking the practice and going so far as to set up mechanisms to allow individuals to ‘out’ those using the tactic.  Apparently Google’s Japan didn’t get the memo.

In the promotion of a new site feature, Google Japan was spamming its own index by using a well known pay-per-post company called CyberBuzz.

Google Japan did make mention of their marketing practices and violation of Google’s search guidelines in doing so on the 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.

That’s where the story sounded like it would end, but CyberBuzz then followed up by saying that they are not a pay-per-post company and that allegations otherwise are false.

While its possible there may be a misunderstanding, Google once again pointed the finger at… Google.  Viewing the cached version of CyberBuzz’s FAQ’s showed that they had changed as the pay-per-post allegations surfaced.   What went missing from CyberBuzz’s pages?  According to a Japanese blogger, it was the following:

Q: How much money can we get as a reward?
A: From a couple hundred yen to thousands of yen ($1-$100 USD) depending on the campaign and your Buzz-level (akky: like karma points)

Q: What do I have to do to get a reward?

A: (snip) Registered members are paid when they write up a blog entry related to the product/service.

I came across this on the Asiajin blog. Start reading here, then follow the related posts: Asiajin – Google Japan Buys Dirty Pay-per-Post Links.

Techcrunch, CNet, and WebProNews also have good coverage.

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