“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.

Google Japan, according to its apology, was apparently unaware of the company’s own terms of service. Paying a Japanese pay-per-post promotion company to pimp its new Hot Keywords blog widget caused the website to be busted down from PR 9 to PR 5.

Many thanks goes out to blogger Akky Akimoto for discovery and English translation of what might described as a big, corporate party foul. When searching for (in Japanese) Google Hot Keywords Ranking  + “Blog Widget” + “CyberBuzz,” Akimoto found over 30 posts writing about the widget, all of them acknowledging being paid by CyberBuzz.

Akimoto says CyberBuzz pays pretty handsomely for blog posts—up to $100 per post. Small ads were present at the bottom as well.

The apology issued from Google Japan is priceless since it suggests Google Japan is just now learning of Google’s search guidelines:

“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.”

Hopefully no form of seppuku will be required and a simple gomenasai (or, if you’re a real Samurai: katajiganai on all fours with head bowed low) and Matt Cutts tweeted policy of treating all sites the same will suffice. Cutts tweets that he expects Google Japan’s new PR5 to remain as is for a while.

The Paid Link Stages Of Grief

On his blog this morning, SEOMoz.org’s Rand Fishkin gave a sneak peak at the presentation he has intended for PubCon in Las Vegas. It’s topic: A solution to the paid links debate.

Fishkin introduces (I’m using a looser sense of this verb, which I’ll get to later) his solution/compromise as "Sponsored Editorials." If this strikes you immediately as similar to pay-per-post, you might be right, but Fishkin has put some idealistic stipulations on an admittedly imperfect model without actually outlining how it differs.

Instead of selling a link, Fishkin suggests selling reviews with links in them. In essence, webmasters are paying for the review, not the link. The reviewer is paid whether or not he or she posts something positive. The link is designated "nofollow" if the reviewer is not offering an endorsement, or the nofollow attribute is removed is the reviewer does offer endorsement.

"The marketplace has to exist," he writes, "and search engine have to fight against what they perceive to be manipulative, non-editorial votes. But, what if there was a solution that could make both sides happy? A place where money changed hands between parties, but editorial decisions still came into play?"

Commentators are quick to point out that while it as at least a step in some direction, it seems only a matter of time (and perhaps very quickly) before this system is also gamed, before money under the table is exchanged for the removal of nofollow tags, before reviewers run unscrupulous review systems. One suggests a more complicated system of credibility ranking, to help control for that.

Or the kind of credibility system like the one Google’s been working on for years. Fishkin’s proposal comes with unfortunate timing. Over the weekend, Google’s Matt Cutts, in a lengthy post, intimated that paid reviews (paid posts) are also on the webspam team’s radar.

Cutts reiterates Google’s commitment to assuring quality information and utilizes the sobering example of brain tumor treatment research. A person researching such a horrifying diagnosis would most likely be aghast, or at least potentially ill-served (if you’ll forgive the pun) if sponsored reviews of medical treatments like radiosurgery influenced the patient’s research results.

Especially if they are reviews like the ones Cutts exhibits where reviewers have bad spelling or demonstrative lack of knowledge about that which they are reviewing.

"For this very important (potentially even life-or-death) medical topic," writes Cutts, "we saw paid reviewers admit that they knew nothing about a treatment before getting paid to post about it, or who didn’t research the subject enough to know that a treatment was decades old instead of brand-new. We saw people writing about brain tumors who didn’t even spell ‘tumor’ correctly, and we saw people who got the name of the sponsor wrong."

In short, things aren’t looking good for the paid post. At least, where one is openly or obviously paid.

A cynical contributor to Aaron Wall’s SEObook, though, makes a fair point that Cutts’ example (that it was fear-based notwithstanding) denies the reality of medical research and the big money behind it. Wall questions whether paid posts are worse than sponsored research, and calls on "RFK" to drive it home:

"The irony is that most/all of the articles that he would prefer to see on the Google SERPS are researched, assembled and ghost written by pharma companies. Having worked with a number of clients in the medical field it’s become more and more apparent that the ‘studies’ published by well-known academics are most often based on research by the drug companies, scripted by a hired copywriter and given to the academic to sign off and publish under their byline."

Surely, and one is also reminded of recent accusations that certain FDA commissioners rejected experimental cancer drug Provenge because of their investments in chemotherapy, a competing treatment.

Though Wall’s post switches direction and delves into the more esoteric concept of "the googlization of reality," the point that no industry or topic is without its vested interests and stakeholders rings a resonant (and perhaps more deeply frightening) bell.

For even the purity of Wikipedia, which Google loves to champion, is not without its soiled fringes – what with secret mailing lists and editor witch hunts gumming up the gears from time to time (watch out for "free range sarcasm").

On to the next stage of grieving then, which is depression for SEOs now looking to bargain with Google about (overtly) paid anything – and that general malaise that comes with the cracking of an ideal that anything, even within Google’s gleaming search rankings, is pure.

And acceptance? Well, if it ever comes, it will be accepting that our porcelain ideals are chipped in practice, are borrowed eventually from the realization that the Behaviorists were right (nothing is without prior motivation), and are never without a dark mirror of an ideal to contradict. But that’s no reason not to have them, now is it?