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Yahoo Japan (who owns Overture Japan) is displaying NO ads with certain keywords.  Such words include the following: gun, tobacco, gamble, cancer, quit smoking, Rogain, hair growing, dieting, esthetic, wrinkle removing, spots removing, cellulite, liposuction and plastic surgery.  There may be more, but you get the idea.

A search for “casino” found four ads.  Three of them refer to Las Vegas and one to US.  There were no ads for online-casinos.

I tried to make one ad for “quit smoking” to see what happens.  Almost at the end of the setup process, a message in red letters popped out, saying that my ads are not displayed.  The message listed four possible causes, but none of them were applicable to my setup.

So Yahoo Japan is blocking certain keywords to be used in the PPC ads.  If your products or services are related to these words, then you have to depend solely on organic ranking with Yahoo Japan.  With Google, however, you still can run PPC ads with Adwords.

I am happy that I have just completed registering a client’s site to Yahoo Japan because it took quite a bit of work. Yahoo didn’t approve our first attempt to register the site, saying that the payment method and cancelation policy for the site’s online-booking are not provided or not easily found. Yahoo also pointed out that a description of one of the products appears in English. So, I helped my client to fix the problems, re-submitted the site, and received an approval. I am relieved because Yahoo gives you only one chance to re-submit a site without an additional charge and it must be done within 30 days.

I checked Yahoo Japan’s website to see if what they pointed out about my client’s site is listed in the guidelines. It wasn’t, but at least I know this now and that’s good.

This registration process took several hours of my time, my client’s time, and Yahoo Japan’s time. I think that it’s amazing that Yahoo Japan enforces such strict registration guidelines. Yahoo Japan must consider this effort at enforcement to pay off in the long run. When a site is “Yahoo registered, ” it means something, therefore more people pay to register their sites, and Yahoo’s brand becomes stronger.

Anyway, I need to remember that Yahoo Japan’s registration involves a serious review of one’s website.

Nissan has a sports coupe called Datsun 280Z or Fair Lady Z. Fair
Lady Z was the original name given to the car when it was
developed in Japan. Someone probably advised Nissan that, to the
Americans, the name Fair Lady Z doesn’t match the car. So the company picked
a different name for the U.S. market.

This illustrates a potential pitfall in naming a product or service in another language. If
you are translating your website into another language, it is worth consulting someone to avoid this “Fair Lady” pitfall. (By the way, “Fair Lady Z” sounds fine to the Japanese people’s ears as a name of a sports coupe, mainly because it is in English. It is similar to any French words sounding sophisticated to the Americans. )

When you search using the same words in Yahoo Japan (Yahoo) and
Google Japanese (Google), the results are quite different. It seems
that the greatest difference is that Yahoo gives more weight to
business sites than to community sites.

For example, when I searched for “Hawaii golf,” (in Japanese) I found that the top 4 sites on Yahoo’s top results page are business sites. The 5th ranking site is a a guide book type community site. On Google, in contrast, thefirst 3 sites listed are community sites.

This difference is probably a reflection of Yahoo’s “Business
Express.” For charging a fee of nearly $500 (or even double in
some cases) for registering a site, it ought to provide some ranking boost in return!

For businesses, it’s a good thing that Yahoo Japan is the most used
search engine in Japan. For Japanese language search users, it’s good to be aware of this difference between Yahoo and Google. If you are looking for products and services, use Yahoo. Otherwise, check out Google as well.

The Chinese search engine Baidu launched its official service in Japan in
January. (www.baidu.jp) Baidu is the number one search engine in China, and is aiming to take some share away from Yahoo and Google in Japan. One of its advantages, it claims, is its ability to analyze Kanji characters. Hmm. Maybe that can be an advantage, I thought.

Now, more than a month later, I haven’t come across with any “real” buzz coming from users and so I decided to check it out myself. I opened three browser windows - for Yahoo, Google and Baidu - searched for a few words and compared the results. The first thing that I noticed was that there are no PPC ads on Baidu. The search results - what comes up on the first page or the next - are somewhat similar to those of Google and quite different from those of Yahoo. The page titles are limited to a shorter length on Baidu, which to me is not great. Instead, Baidu shows a date that appears to be the date on which the page was created. That is good. Other than that, I don’t see any major differences.

Overall, I don’t see anything that stands out on the Baidu search engine that is better than its competitors. Well, that doesn’t sound good for Baidu, does it?

I am doing a link building campaign for a client. I searched for websites that are relevant to the client’s site, made a list of them and asked them if they would post a link. It sounds simple, but it’s very time consuming. I spent nearly two full days to come up with a list of 30 sites and write to them!

Why does it take so long? Well, I look at each site and pick the most qualified ones. Then, I write a customized, personal e-mail to each webmaster.

The reward is receiving friendly responses. It’s like making new
friends and building a network. Now I can go back and contact these people directly if I have another client whose business shares something in common with these sites.

I found some Japanese movie clips that show how to iron. One is for a dress shirt (9 minutes) and another is for trousers (4 minutes). Both have something interesting to see towards the end. The one about dress shirts shows a way to store ironed dress shirts without squashing them. The one about trousers shows a better way of using a cloth to prevent having a shine.

Depending on who you ask to translate, the same sentence can can be translated quite differently.

Here are 3 different translations of the same Japanese sentence by different translators. (C) is my translation.
A) In regards to the remarkable trouble you have caused the public on suspicion of ordinance infraction dealing with the prevention of misconduct using force, on 7/30/2007, the action was taken not to bring suit to prosecute.

B) As of July 30, 2007, I waived the indictment of the case that you were suspected to have violated the Ordinance against Disturbing the Peace.

C) On July 30, 2007, we decided to waive the indictment against you for the alleged violation of Ordinance for Safe and Secure Community Development.

(A) and (B) are examples of poor translation.

I set aside time  everyday to surf the Internet to stay current with Jpaanese search engine marketing.So, what did I learn today? I learned that in Japan, some peolpe use the term SEM to refer PPC. In fact, I find many words that Japanese people use to point to the same thing, including “listing kokoku (ads),” “keusaku rendo kokoku,” and “P4P.” (pay for placement? not sure…) How confusing.

I don’t agree with using SEM to mean PPC. Marketing refers to a much wider range of activities than advertising.

Someone asked me why is the amount spent on PPC in Japan much lower than in other countries. Good question. I thought about it and came up with one hypothesis.

I noticed that from the advertisers data that I have, CPC (cost per click) tends to be significantly less with Overture (Yahoo!) Japan than with Adwords (Japan) for the same advertiser running practically the same campaign.  Note that what I am talking about is about one year ago. I don’t have enough data for the period after that.

If Yahoo! is the dominant search engine in Japan and its PPC ads are charging less than Google, that would keep the overall amount spent in the country at a lower level than other countries where Google is dominant.

Another thing is CTR (click through rate). From what I know, CTR was on the downslope with the ads running at Overture Japan over a year or so up to late last year. It could be - this is my wild guess - that Yahoo! Japan has improved its organic search so much, that people are not looking at ads on Yahoo! Japan’s result pages as much as they used to. Business Express - Yahoo! Japan’s registration system - can also be contributing to this effect, but I will expand on it on a future post.

Low CTR at Yahoo! Japan would also push down the overall spending in the country. And maybe, that is why Yahoo! Japan needed to shift to Panama.