Google Using Sponsored Posts

I haven’t seen too much of this circulating the Internet, despite it being pretty big news: Google is using sponsored posts to promote it’s search engine website in Asia. Story at TechCrunch.

Google is undoubtedly the dominant search engine globally, but in a few countries such as Korea (Naver), Russia (Yandex) or Japan, local competitors are winning. Especially Japan, the country with the world’s third biggest Internet population (about 100 million people are online), still seems to be a tough nut to crack for Google.

…the Japanese blogosphere… is filled with reports about Google hiring Cyberbuzz, a Tokyo-based Internet marketing company to promote the keyword feature (its widget version) with a pay-per-post campaign. And in fact, the search string “Google Hot Keywords Ranking+Blog Widget+CyberBuzz” in Japanese in Google’s own Blog Search leads to a few dozen results, indicating the reports aren’t made up of thin air. This blogger, for example, integrated the keyword widget and praises the list as being very useful to be kept up-to-date on what is going on in the world. This one says the keywords change every 20 minutes and that the new Google feature once quickly helped in obtaining information on a Japanese TV star. All postings end with a disclosure that says: “I am taking part in the Cyberbuzz campaign”.

You see, the big news is that in the United States, Google slashed the PageRank of websites and blogs that did sponsored posts, going on a rampage against the sponsored post industry– in particular, against PayPerPost, the most publicized sponsored post company. Google targeted “Posties” by slashing their PageRank, rendering their blogs nearly worthless to a certain demographic of advertisers, which of course affected the bloggers’ blogs and their paychecks. Google took a higher “moral” stance on websites with sponsored posts.

And now, here’s Google, creating and paying bloggers to write sponsored posts for THEM. $100 a post for some of them! Unbelievable. No, really– believable. I don’t for one moment believe that Google slashed PageRank because they were concerned about the purity of the blogosphere. Googles was doing it for DA MONEY. Sponsored posts and other TLAs interfere with Google’s bottom line, which is, of course, their top priority.

JERKS!!

And they do it in Asia, where more users are using Yahoo’s search engine for finding stuff like Bamboo shades, than using Google. So when the rubber meets the road, Google takes their self-proclaimed “low” road.

GRR!! I’m amazed that too few people are blogging about this. This is big news. This is more proof that shows what hypocrites and power-mongers sit in Mountain View, CA. :-p

P.S. There’s another good story about the fiasco here. Apparently, after Google was caught red-handed, Google apologized and slashed the PageRank on GoogleJapan for the sponsored posts– from a PR9 to 5!