Things may not be absolutely stable just yet, but it isn’t hard to say Google’s last update, called “Penguin”, is going to change the way people approach SEO not only in Japan, but in the whole World, to an even greater extent than Panda.

The problem is, the penguin we’re dealing with is more of a socially akward one than an emperor.

Last year’s Panda did a good job, removing a lot of low quality contents from Google’s index. There were a few collateral casualties, but they were quick to recover, and objectively the relevance of search results improved significantly.

Now, Google decided to take things a step further and try and hit the bad SEO guys, black hats, spammers, call them what you want. I say, great! There is yet a lot in this field to do for sure. So, Google rolled out a new update to take down sites that were “overoptimized”, especially regarding incoming links.

And this is when s*** happened…

Can't wait for the duck update!

Long story short, relevance of results significantly decreased from what I’ve seen on a number of English, Japanese and even French requests. Some quite decent sites have disappeared although they had clean link profiles, and worse still, some awful ones made it to the top of results, helped with… keyword stuffing. You know, that dumb tactic from the 90′s? Some sites exclusively relying on directory links, using always the same descriptions and anchors, seem to have held up exceptionally well.

So what is causing this? Well, after discussing with lots of webmasters and SEOs from different countries and backgrounds, it seems Google decided to hit certain types of links in priority. Especially those from PR sites and blogging platforms with optimized anchors seem to be having really nasty effect. This is leaving out a LOT of really terrible blog networks and low quality directories, which kind of blows my mind. My feeling is that we’re facing a half-baked update, which doesn’t only need to be better balanced, but also do what it is supposed to do thoroughly: take the crap out of the Internet.

What to do for now? I’m not sure. I don’t expect Google to let such a poor update out without reacting quickly, and I would advise webmasters/SEO people not to panic and give it a few extra weeks. As a first, safe measure, you could review your current backlinks and, when possible, edit those that may seem “too good to be genuine”, particularly regarding anchor texts.

So far, this blog seems to actually have benefited from the update, but trying to have a reasonable look at things, there’s just no way our little penguin will remain as it is. Learn manners, my little friend, and come back prettier!

So, a couple of months ago, I installed the CommentLuv plugin on this blog not really knowing what to expect. Since I’ve been asked about the results a few times, I’ll share some here.

One question that comes up a lot is “Do you get more spam?”. The short answer to that would be Yes. I do get a lot of spam, more than before I installed the plugin. But it is hard to say whether it is the plugin’s fault or if it is just my site being noticed (I mean, scraped) and added to spammers’ lists. In general, from the moment you put a blog with anything identifying it as a WordPress blog, you can expect spam to be overwhelming.

The SEO effects? I don’t really know. Apparently, this site ranks well for “commentluv seo”, which I frankly don’t give a… which I don’t really care about, right. Anything with Japan attached would interest me more… What I can say is that it didn’t hurt my rankings, nor did improve them very significantly.

Now, what people want with this plugin is more human-written comments, correct? I do get more of these, clearly. Most of them come from people coming here to get a backlink, more or less discretely. One thing I realized is that it’s so so so easy to tell when someone comes to pick up a backlink for their SEO, Japanese or not, even the comment is relevant.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve been commenting on blogs with the intention of gaining relevant backlinks for my site… but I am doing some sorting between comments that really add something to the conversation, and those that may be absolutely relevant to the topic, but pretty empty in terms of added value. I’ll get you a few examples of what types of messages I usually validate and those I ignore.

Conclusion? Well, this may be a bit of a disappointing answer when you expect a clear YES or NO, but my best advice is to just give it a try. It did nothing to hurt my SEO, the spam is pretty bad whether you use the plugin or not any, and I got a couple of really nice comments. Takes me more time to sort them but I consider it an acceptable price to pay. See what works best for you!

So, this is the time of the year where website owners freak out seeing their sites’ rankings go down and up and disappear and come back (maybe), the time of the year where webmasters question themselves “What did I do wrong?”.

After the infamous Panda Update, Google again came with a number of algorithm updates, trying to penalize sites that broke (a number of) its guidelines. And this time, implementation in Japan was quite fast, compared to our dear Panda.

More specifically, two types of penalty got a number of sites are starting to be kicked out of the SERPs:

-Aggressive anchoring: having 99% of your links anchored with the very keyword you are targeting is, well, suspicious. Most of the time this penalty seems to be automatic, so the best way to recover from it is to either update your old links with more natural anchors, or build new links with new linking texts.

-Over-optimization: do you need to have your keyword repeated 4 times in the title tag, even if the 4 versions are slightly different? Short answer: NO. It is unnatural, and Google is apparently getting good at detecting these types of things. So, make sure you don’t use your keywords more than needed. How to know whether or not it is the case? Well, if your copy doesn’t read very naturally, you certainly have the answer in hand…

These are the two big updates from Google for March/April and the effects on search engine results have already been very significant here in Japan.

This week I spent some time doing research about Japanese SEO resources. I of course did have some already, but sites live and die so fast that you need to refresh your lists a little bit every once in a while.

So I went digging, this time mostly for social bookmarking sites and directories, and I am reasonably satisfied with my findings. The social bookmarking sites in Japan are still far from being a strong trend, but I found an extra 2-3 I didn’t know before and that will complete my little Japanese resources collection.

Browsing through link directories was much more time costing. I had to do a lot of filtering through literally thousands of links to remove too low quality directories, those who don’t validate sites anymore etc… In the end, I came up with 20-30 directories that are of decent quality and have their own domain name. More satisfying was the fact I found a couple of Japanese link directories engines I didn’t know about. Pretty promising for my future SEO efforts!

It was a lot of work, and, to be frank, it was pretty tedious at times… but it is research, it is what you need to do if you want to stay at the top of your game. At least, it leaves me with the satisfactory feeling that I have stronger resources than ever!

If you read some of my previous articles on this blog, you probably know already that I consider Japanese websites much less vulnerable to spam and black hat SEO tactics than their foreign equivalents. Your blogs, guestbooks and message boards never really get overly spammed and this is all great.  Now does it mean people here never employ tactics to artificially boost their rankings?

The answer is a big and definitive NO! They simply use tricks that are a little less dark, a little less unethical. And they’re kind of right because from what I’ve seen, it works pretty strong here.

The gray (dark gray?) tactic I see used a lot is automatic link exchange. You have something like 3-4 big platforms and networks that offer this service: you plug in your site, your title, your description and here you go! Usually these sites let you refuse manually link exchange with bad sites, but only let choose your category between very vague ones, such as “Business” or “Shopping”. They won’t let you spin your descriptions to make them unique, either.

So you do get a lot of links, but obviously these are of low quality. But since they are organized in tight networks, they actually are pretty strong at the moment. Panda apparently didn’t work the same just everywhere…

I can’t really blame people who enter these networks, because they actually provide some sorts of results, free of charge. The thing is, the day Google decides they’ve got enough of this and starts detecting such networks, most of these sites who rely only on automatic link exchange will see their rankings decrease dramatically, if they don’t get sandboxed.

I would recommend against these networks, because they are not what you want for the long term. If you want to give it a try though, make sure that you are extremely picky about the sites you accept to exchange links with, and don’t neglect other, more ethical forms of link building.

There’s one question your hear a lot in the international marketing/SEO sphere recently: Can and will Google+ grow enough to catch Facebook someday?

The situation here in Japan is a little different. Gree, Mixi and Mobage are the leading social networks and Facebook, although progressively gaining ground, is still fairly far behind the 100% Japanese SNS, that are probably more adapted to the local audience.

Another point is, Google+’s growth in the West owes much to the search engine itself, and Google’s very aggressive marketing. But here in Japan, Yahoo is still the leading search engine, may it be by a small margin, and it won’t display results depending on your circles, or promote G+ directly.

Actually, Japanese SERPs tend to give Google+ much less visual importance when compared to their European/North American counterparts. It doesn’t necessarily mean Big G isn’t trying to break into the Japanese market, but they are most like aware of the uniqueness of this market and may not want to spend too much money.

Does it mean Google+ shouldn’t matter for Japanese businesses? Not at all! As a rather niche SNS, G+ in Japan will attract techies, other marketers and in general people who are active on the Internet. I can still offer some interesting opportunities, not to mention the potential SEO benefits.

My take would be: see Google+ in Japan a bit like you would see LinkedIn, a place where you can meet interesting people you may want to partner with  and increase your B2B efforts, rather than a website where you will be easily able to reach large audiences and the mass market.

After thinking about it for a couple of days, I finally decided to install and start using CommentLuv on this blog and start rewarding good contributors with a juicy backlink to their website. Whether you have just a small blog about Japan or you sell SEO/marketing services, you are welcome here.

Nofollow links never stopped spam which tends, sometimes, to be overwhelming I have to say. And I really am happy to help people who share wise and meaningful ideas in their SEO efforts.

On my side, I will do all I can do update this blog more regularly with useful contents for people who are trying to break into the unique market that Japan is.

See you soon for more articles about SEO in Japan!

Submitting your new site to good quality directories is certainly one of the first tasks most link builders would handle. When you post to the right places, you can get a bunch of fairly relevant backlinks, some of which carrying decent authority. That’s a fine way to start an SEO campaign.

If you think of the English webosphere, you have a good number of these directories (at the very least a few dozens of good quality ones), and submitting to them all will take you quite some time.

Thinking of Japan, your options are more limited… you can litterally count the big players on a Simpson’s hand:

-Yahoo!: just like in the US, it will cost you an arm and a lung to submit there, but it’s the strongest one, by far.

-Dmoz: where patience is a virtue. I hardly see any changes on this directory anymore, but, it still carries quite some weight in search engines, so… give it a try anyway.

-Rakuten: They have a directory which looks a lot like Yahoo’s except it’s free. What’s more, the last time I checked it, it was autoapprove, as long as you registered on their site.

-Your local Chamber of Commerce: if you have a business ID in Japan, you are eligible for a free listing, including a backlink, on your local Chamber of Commerce homepage. Just Google it!

Besides these websites, there are maybe a handful of sort-of-decent directories. Business listings, local listings, these kinds of directories that focus on a area or speciality. But once again, it may take time until you find one that has decent contents and doesn’t require you to link back.

Long story short: don’t spend too much time looking for and submitting to directories for your Japanese page, get a few acceptable links to give your site a kick-start and focus on more important things.

One thing I always find fascinating about SEO in general is how well it reflects aspects of different societies. For example, in this article, I wrote about how link building sometimes felt like building your own network in the real World.

One of the cultural aspects of Japan I like most is respect and safety. I’m living in Osaka, which is said to be the most dangerous city in Japan, but frankly speaking I feel a lot safer here than I would in any city in France, where I grew. It’s not that there are not criminals and unrespectful people here, just a lot lot less than in the West.

Well, that’s pretty much the same with Black Hat SEO, spamming, shady link building tactics, link farms, call that the way you want to. I think there’s no need to explain in detail how the English webosphere is affected by these things. Same applies to French websites. Then Google sent a big panda to start taking care of these things.

Anyway, compared to, well pretty much any country in the World, Japan is not really affected by black hat tactics and low quality links. There are lots of blogs that are open to comments, that autoapprove comments, but they are generally pretty much spam-free. You don’t have more than a few low quality directories, a few press release sites, usually of good quality, not too many Stumbleupon or Reddit copycats, and link farms are marginal and isolated.

It’s actually interesting to see there are virtually no Japanese Black hat SEO tools. Like I said, a lot of stuff is autoapproved on the Japanese web, and these tools would be easy to create, especially in a country with so many talented coders. The fact is that nobody does.

Having a strong network, may the contacts be superficial, seems to be what comes closer to the idea of black hat. And I guess we should all be satisfied with these kinds of standards.

This one question I see debated a lot lately: you, as a foreigner, do you need or at least shall you use keigo when you do business in Japan / with Japanese people ?

From what I’ve seen, there seem to be two schools of thought, basically splitting evenly people who participate in these discussions:

-Yes, you need to use keigo when doing business.

Keigo and its formalities help reduce stress in a working environment.
Not being able to use it correctly may result in worsening your working evenironment.

 

Keigo is a must in many situations. If you do not use Keigo, it can cause (your business partner) confusion in understanding your idea of the relationship. My best advice would be to list up words that you would need and ignore words that you would not. (understand, you need to speak it as much as you can)

-No you don’t

In my opinion, foreigners do not need to speak keigo. They are not expected to speak keigo. Take it as an advantage of being a foreigner if you will (understand, if you are confident you can use some keigo, make it an advantage, but don’t overdo it). Sure, it is always better to understand it and know it but one can be respectful to others in non-keigo as well.

 

Keigo consists of “Sonkei-go,” “Kenjo-go,” and “Teinei-go.” As far as I am concerned, if you are good with “Teinei-go,” it’s enough. It may sound extreme, but NO Japanese can use proper Keigo, either… (same idea, as a foreigner, you’d easily be forgiven not to master Keigo, as most Japanese people struggle themselves).

What category do you fall into? And what are your arguments? Hopefully I will be able to update this post with your feedback!