Is Google more serious about incoming links than Yahoo Japan?
I added two recent Japanese SEO projects to my portfolio. I am happy to say that both sites are ranked very high. The two cases – a site for an English language school in Japan and a vacation-rental booking site - were similar from my perspective. Both sites were nowhere to be found on SERP (search engine result page) due to lack of basic SEO elements such as title tags written in Japanese.
On both sites, I re-organized the content and overhauled the navigation menu for search engine bots and for the human users. I also wrote and added copy, again for bots and human users, then I fortified the pages with proper tags, etc.
As of today (5/7/2010), and with the keywords the site owners targeted, the language school’s site is ranked number 1 (!) on the first page with Yahoo Japan, and listed on the second page with Google.co.jp. The vacation-rental site is also on the first page with Yahoo Japan but it’s on the 4th page with Google.co.jp.
Why are these sites ranked lower with Google? First thing that comes to my mind is incoming links. Both of these sites do not have many links form other sites, and maybe Google is more serious about incoming links than Yahoo Japan is. Could it be so?