Japanese SEO,

One of the guidelines that Yahoo Japan lays out for its Business Express is that a translated website must provide sufficient content and all necessary information in Japanese.  If the website is a shopping site, a Japanese user should be able to shop without needing to read English.  In addition, company information, its return policy, and payment and shipping information must be provided in Japanese.

What about external links to a booking service for a hotel, golf course, etc., that is only in English?  It is okay to place such links on your Japanese site, as long as:  (1) It is clearly noted that the link leads to an English site.  (2)  Your site has sufficient price information in Japanese and does not depend on the linked site for it.  (3) Your site provides alternative ways to book, such as by e-mail, by telephone, etc.

What Yahoo Japan considers to be sufficient is subjective. However, in my experience, Yahoo Japan is more demanding than one would expect.  Recently, I submitted a hotel site and Yahoo Japan pointed out that the package price information was lacking.  So I learned a lesson; don’t expect Yahoo Japan to overlook anything.

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.

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.

About two weeks ago, I asked more than 25 Japanese female shoppers who were vacationing here in Hawaii, whether they have shopped online and what sites they have shopped at. Clearly, the most mentioned were Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auction. A few mentioned Rakuten, and that was about it. Yahoo! is so dominant in Japan. No wonder e-bay gave up and retreated from the Japan market.