Japanese SEO,

Yahoo Japan announced on 7/27 that it will use Google technology to run its search engine and search ad delivery system (PPC). The search technology switch is planned to take place first.

While Yahoo (US) is switching to Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo Japan chose Google as their new partner to provide search technology. Yahoo Japan’s press release lists two reasons; One is that Google’s search technology is the best one available particularly for search in Japanese language, and the other is Google’s most advanced PPC system.

Upon this announcement, some media reported that this means about 90 percent of Web queries in Japan would be powered by Google, using 53.2% and 37.3% Web query share figures published by Nielsen/NetRatings, a Tokyo based search firm. But Masahiro Inoue, chief executive of Yahoo Japan, says that addition is nonsense.

Yahoo Japan’s and Google’s search results pages will not be the same

This switch does not mean that Yahoo Japan’s and Google’s search results pages will be the same. Yahoo Japan has been using Yahoo US’s search technology called YST, but Yahoo Japan has customized it by adding and mixing search results pulled from its own “popular contents” to make up the search result pages. Yahoo Japan plans to continue doing so upon replacing YST with Google’s search technology. In other words, Yahoo Japan’s search result pages will be a mix of two things; search results pulled from Google’s data (index) and search results pulled from Yahoo Japan’s content data.

Yahoo Japan is a mega portal

Yahoo Japan’s “popular content” includes Yahoo! Map, Yahoo! Gourmet, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Travel, Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Answers (Chiebukuro). Yahoo Japan’s main site, yahoo.co.jp is a mega portal site that also includes search.

In fact, the other part of the agreement between Yahoo Japan and Google is that Yahoo will provide up to the minute data on Yahoo! Auction, Yahoo! Shopping, and Yahoo! Answers to Google. This will help Google to deliver timely search results from these contents. Yahoo! Auction is a dominant auction site in Japan that made e-Bay retreat from the market.

Only half or one third of a search result page to show search results from Google

In an interview, Inoue stated that on Yahoo Japan’s search result pages, the proportion of the space showing results from search engine (YST) has been declining in the past years, and that “although I can’t give specific figures, the space showing search results from Google’s data could be one half or one third of a result page.”

You can see how this mixing is done by doing the same search on Yahoo Japan (yahoo.co.jp) and Yahoo US (yahoo.com) and comparing the results. For example, if you search for “ramen (noodle) Osaka”, a map of central Osaka with 10 ramen shops appear at the top of the search result page, and some Q&A excerpts from Yahoo! Answer appear at the bottom of the page.

I think it’s great for the people in Japan (and those who live abroad including myself) to have a choice between two competitive search engines.

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?