Once upon a time Google bitchslapped me for selling direct text link advertising— ads which were clearly ads from a human standpoint, but the advertisers were hoping Google would thinking of them as editorial endorsements.

But here's the thing: in Japan Google is not the dominant search engine. Yahoo is. And like any other also-ran web site, Google Japan wants to be Web Site Numero Uno!

So Google Japan paid a bunch of bloggers to post about them. Which is at least one full step further in a black hat direction than anything Boutell.Com— and hundreds of nationally known newspaper sites and the like— were doing a few years ago when Google bent us all over its 800-pound gorilla knee.

So Google is spanking itself. They dropped google.co.jp's pagerank from a nine to a five in the Google seearch toolbar. Which is probably about as real as the original "warning shot over the bow" pagerank drop they applied to sites like mine.

I can't make this shit up folks.

TechPost: Google Uses Every Trick To Beat Yahoo In Japan

Matt Cutts of Google offers apology, describes Google's self-flagellation process

Tags: geek, google, seo, web