The other day, I was shocked to hear that Google was employing a pay-per-post stategy in Japan–precisely the sort of strategy they’ve historically condemned. I was certainly among those crying “hypocrisy”.
Well, to his credit, so was Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. In fact, he didn’t just complain–his team did something about it. Via “Google Penalizing Google” at Google Blogoscoped:
head of Google’s anti web-spam team Matt Cutts via Twitter writes, “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.”
Matt Cutts blogged about it himself today, saying “To the extent that I can speak on behalf of Google, I apologize that this happened.” I haven’t met Matt yet (I’m looking forward to meeting him at the SIGIR ‘09 Industry Track!), but I’m delighted to see this preview of his integrity.
