Also, to the German webmasters and SEOs out there: don’t fear the Linkzar.

I do have a minor issue that is reflected in some requests, re-consideration of penalties need to be improved and contact webmasters who have google webmaster accounts about penalties would also help!

One other thing, I’ve reported endless sites foir buying links and none of them get penalised, does google even look at these?

Regards

A PR reduction of 4 wow, big whoop. My blog has been blown out of the results by Google, i search for “mydomain.com title of page” and i’m nowhere amongst just a few hundred results.

What comes up before me? Guestbook spam that doesn’t even have my domain, sites that have scraped my feed snippets and link back to me, sites labeled as “Malware may harm your computer” etc.

I posted on Google Webmaster help, everyone tore my site to shreds and the only problem was 2 errors in my CSS (xHTML is Strict Valid) and there is 3 sites my friend owns on the same IP linking to mine because they get related traffic.

Matt, how about you knock 4 PR points off my PR5 and give me my rankings back instead of directing people to malware and guestbook spam who are trying to find any of my content?

Google fair? Yeah right, i also find it humorous Google is completely destroying user experience to penalize me for a couple of links. Well.. No i will not remove them, if someone i know in real life wants to link to me so be it Google’s the one looking bad going by the many comments from people looking for my site.

So, have a great day!

including its own PageRank and thus its rankings in Google.

Why would they care about ranking in Google when they ARE a SE of Google? BTW, they still have the number 1 spot for the handful that actually DO search for Google Japan.

The only thing worse that NOT taking action, is to pretend to take action and thinking it will fool the people.

So with that said, did Google.jp talk to Y! and apologize for not playing well with others?

Seems like the only credible thing to do.

When you say “ripple effects for google.co.jp where we lose trust in the links for that domain” – do you mean all the sites linking to google.co.jp will lose trust (albeit a very small amount I imagine) or do you mean the sites that google.co.jp is linking out to will lose trust?

Certainly at least the latter, Tom, which in turn can affect google.co.jp in various ways, including its own PageRank and thus its rankings in Google.

“Is that true, reduction in page rank from 9 to 5 ?”

That’s correct, Narendra.s.v.

Since Google wants to make an example, and rather than being hypocritical(as Google usually is) why don’t they inflict the SERP, the +60, and the not ranking for their domain name penalty as well, just like they have been doing to all other sites since August of 2007.

You want to exemplify a ‘real penalty’, then might I such that you; ‘Do Unto Yourself as You Do Unto Others …’

Think about it, people…what is the primary reason that the PPP community exists? Perceived search engine benefits…something Google really can’t take advantage of as such because well…they’re a search engine. If they wanted to put themselves at the top of every SERP they deem to be relevant…well, they could. It wouldn’t be very smart of them to do it, but they wouldn’t need to pay a bunch of blog posters to do something that they could do in-house and presumably in a much less expensive manner. Not only that, they could do it in a way that would be so subtle that no one might ever notice. Remember, they control the horizontal and the vertical (other than personalized search, and even that has its limitations).

So…what other reasons could Google possibly have to use a PPP service provider? Here are two really obvious (yet really effective if done right) possibilities:

1) To get feedback on their new widget (i.e. a focus group).

2) To spread the word about the widget to new potential Google users (i.e. a marketing campaign).

In other words, Google’s intent was in all likelihood perfectly innocent and well-meaning, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the SEO/SEM community. The reason this turned into an issue? Because the SEO/SEM community totally bastardized yet another perfectly good idea and did what it usually does to anything that might be useful…turned it into a vested-interest entitlement-without-reason screw-you-screw-me industry whereby the only people who stand any chance at succeeding are those on the top of the pyramid selling snake oil to the lemmings underneath. The guys who created ReviewMe, PayPerPost, SponsoredReviews and (insert other PPP front for SEM scam here) are the ones who caused this, not Google.

That’s probably why Google came up with the TBPR punishment…they knew that the majority of people who would be angered by this story would also be ignorant enough to be satisfied by an adjustment of a value that ultimately doesn’t mean much of anything. A few of the so-called smarter types will still rail on about Google doing evil and how this is hypocritical and how the punishment is only for show and so on and so on…but again, why should Google really punish itself for a situation that other people created?