Japanese SEO,

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.