Motoko’s weblog

On July 27, Yahoo Japan and Google Japan announced that Yahoo Japan’s organic search results will soon be powered by Google. Needless to day, this change would have a huge impact on many search marketers and site owners targeting Japanese market. Today, I’d like to go over the facts mentioned in the announcements, and examine how it may change the search marketing in Japan.

Fact 1) Yahoo Japan will use Google’s organic search engine
I personally welcome this change in regards to the algorithm producing the search results. Unfortunately, it is a well known fact that those link farms and the paid links can improve the organic ranking in Yahoo right now, and many search marketers and the site owners in Japan think/believe that SEO is nothing more than Continue Reading »

Yahoo Search (Japan) had 2,609 mil search queries during the month of April, which made them the number 1 search site in Japan. According to the report by NetRatings (netratings.co.jp) “Search Service Usage Report” (the search conducted on PC at home and work), Google search had second most search users and the number of search queries in Japan.

Fields: SearchBrands/SearchUsers/Reach/Queries/PageViews/Sessions (thousands)

Continue Reading »

In addition to the regular Yahoo algorithm updates, time to time, Yahoo Japan has its own algorithm changes, which are unique to Japanese market. In December 2009, they had another major updates, and many experienced the changes in ranking. Here is a list of some of the changes I’ve seen in the past month.

• The authority pages are valued more
• The hub pages are valued more
• The accessibility and the file size are valued more

Of course, the competition level is different depending on the keyword, and that also determines how much of the changes you saw since the last update.

Now, in order to benefit from this update, I recommend following optimization work: Continue Reading »

Baidu Japan started its mobile search service. In addition to mobile sites, it searches web, images/photos and videos. The unique service of this new search engine is that it lets you search with “Emoji” (emoticon) , too! Some of you may remember that iPhone struggled to gain the market share in Japan when it was introduced to the market. One of the biggest reasons why people didn’t want to use iPhone was that you couldn’t use “Emoji” with iPhone. Since then, Softbank added this Emoji function to iPhone, and now it’s the most popular mobile phones in Japan. In fact, Emoji is a big part of communication method for Japanese people not only with instant messaging, but with blogs, SMSs, etc. One of the first functions added to mixi (Japan’s popular SNS site) was a list of emoticons, too.

However, enabling Emoji search on mobile is much more than a “fun” factor, it helps search experiences. For example, Continue Reading »