Japanese SEO,

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.