Since Yahoo Japan and Google Japan announced its plan for search service tie-up (both organic search and PPC services) in July, the search business partnership has been getting much of the attention and some criticisms. Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), who initially gave a statement that they didn’t think it would violate the Antitrust (or Competition) Law, is now investigating the potential problems in response to Rakuten’s reqeust submitted last month, by interviewing organizations and businesses including Microsoft.

Also, several members of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party have formed “The Internet Search Issues Investigation Group” to create a bill to assure fair search and online advertising services by picking up issues that may not be regulated by the Antitrust Law.

The partnership has a major impact in business’s search engine marketing strategies in Japan, and everyone is paying a close attention to both engines’ move. Despite the criticisms, Yahoo seems to move forward with the switch, at least for now.

Yahoo results in FireFox

Yahoo results in Chrome

Google Results in FireFox

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 the link building. Yahoo has made good money by being a part of that by selling the category listing. Once Yahoo is powered by Google, these sites that are relying heavily on the link building would drop the ranking.

Fact 2) Yahoo will provide the content data from Yahoo Auction, Yahoo Shopping and Yahoo Chiebukuro (Q&A) to Google.
Both Yahoo and Google have adopted the blended (universal) search in Japan. By pulling content from Yahoo’s auction, shopping, etc., it would further limit the number of organic page results in the search ranking shelf space. SEO is no longer limited to the website/page optimization.

Fact 3) Yahoo and Google will customize each search result for their audience
With my experience, Google performs better with older generation, professional, male, especially for B2B businesses, even though Yahoo has a bigger market share in Japan. I don’t think that this trend won’t change anytime soon, and expect the engines to cater the search results for their audience separately. You won’t get exactly the same search results on Yahoo and Google. To find the best mix for their audience, we’ll probably see the changes in the search results for a while.
See below graphic for the area of search result page that may change. (Red: PPC Ads, Blue: Organic Results, Pink: Yahoo JP Contents)

Fact 4) Yahoo Japan will use Google’s PPC platform
This is great. There are more convenient tools for AdWords than for Yahoo’s Sponsored Search. Though you’d still should adjust the keywords and ad copies for each engine.

Fact 5) PPC campaign account will be kept separately by Yahoo and Google
I wish they would combine the accounts, too. But we’d need to manage the accounts separately…

It looks like bing/Microsoft has missed the opportunity to grow the market share in Japan.

Announcement in Google Japan official blog

Announcement in Yahoo Japan official blog

Announcement in Yahoo Japan Listing Ads official blog

(Can’t read in Japanese? Use Google Translate.)

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

While 52 million people searched in April, the number of people searched at 14 different search sites adds up to 103.7 million. It clearly shows that most people use multiple search sites.

The interesting point is that while Yahoo Japan had almost twice as many search queries than Google (Yahoo: 2,609 mil – Google: 1,660 mil), the difference in the number of search users between Yahoo Japan and Google Japan was 30% (Yahoo: 42,2 mil – Google: 29.2 mil). What does this mean? Do people still net surf on Yahoo or do they get better search results in Google so that they don’t need to try different search queries to get the information they are looking for?

• 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:

Check your inbound link landscape for numbers, IPs, and domains. This should give you an idea for the next step of your link building to make your site more authoritative website.

Create a chart showing how the web pages on your site are linked each other. This should give you additional data for the next step of your on-site link building and to make each of your SEO target page more of the hub page.

Lighten the file size and fasten the download speed. Remember, a page downloads quickly in US could take much longer to download in overseas.

However, enabling Emoji search on mobile is much more than a “fun” factor, it helps search experiences. For example, when you search for “Dentist + (emoticon for phone)”, Baidu would give dentist sites with phone number in the search results. Since you are searching with mobile, you could then call a dentist straight from the search results.

To access Baidu mobile, you can scan QR code on the page linked above, or go to http://m.baidu.jp. They offer Baidu webmaster tool for mobile here: http://webmaster.baidu.jp/mobile/

Here’s a list of Emoji per provider: http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/service/3G/mail/pictogram/list.html

New Yahoo Japan Keyword Assist

The keyword assist function was added to Yahoo search box to help searchers narrow the search results by providing a list of popular search queries including the word/phrase typed in the search box. (See below.)

Yahoo JP keyword assist

This could be a reputation manager’s nightmare. If a company had some bad news, scandals, etc., the search term could long live on the keyword assist list. Since it’s a human nature to read gossip, even a person wasn’t aware of it when (s)he came to search, there’s a good possibility for him/her to click gossip related word from the list to see what comes up in the results. And since these are popular search terms, the more clicks the word gets, longer it stays on the list. See the bad cycle here?

So, how will this new function of converting Roma-ji into Japanese characters impact the target keywords? English words (company names, product names, etc.) are the ones that most likely to have the impact. For example, when I typed “shop” in the search box, the keyword assist gave me a list of Japanese words/phrases that include word “shop” such as “shop channel”, “shopping” and “shopping mall”. If English version of any of these words are on your keyword list, you may want to pay closer attention for the next a few months to see if it still makes sense to optimize against those words or to budget the same amount for those words on PPC campaign.

New Yahoo Keyword Assist - Shop

Next, I typed “panas” as a person may typing “panasonic” in the search box. As shown below, before I completed typing “panasonic”, it game me a list of Japanese search terms related to Panasonic. They may now want to optimize the page better for Japanese version of the brand name.

Yahoo Japan Keyword Assist - Panasonic

When we do the keyword research for our clients, we always check what come up in the keyword assist tool, and put them into the consideration for SEO and PPC campaigns.

This may be a way to strengthen Yahoo’s online advertising services, which currently provides display ads, text ads, e-mail ads and affiliate programs. By bringing in Overture’s PPC services into Yahoo advertising service plan, they will be able to provide the total online advertising services to its customers. And, in near future, we may be able to get a data and report showing if and how each advertising effort has positive impact on other advertising or marketing efforts.

Perhaps, this is a clever move before the integration of bing search engine into Yahoo site as many advertisers are wondering if the relation between Microsoft and Yahoo will include the advertising services in future or not.

According to Overture’s 2008 Q4 financial report (ended March 2009), Overture had more than 92.8 Billion yen in sales, which was more than 1/3 of Yahoo Japan’s overall sales in the same quarter.

Personally, I think bing and Yahoo Japan are even a better match than US counterparts, and here’s why:

Yahoo Japan would keep its popular brand that has been known as a face of search in Japan. This will prevent from losing search users for not being familiar with bing search. Many search users simply search using Yahoo tool bar, and it’ll probably take a while for many (average) search users to notice that it’s powered by bing.

Yahoo Japan’s popular services are; Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Auctions, Yahoo Travel, and Yahoo “Chiebukuro” (Q&A). This fit perfectly with bing’s search pillars like Shopping search and Travel search. bing Japan provides Q&A as one of the pillar search, too. I think Japanese search users would love bing’s shopping and travel search services, which is (in my opinion) the best search services out there. bing should do a better job marketing each function rather than to concentrating on creating brand recognition. People will come once they know what they can do with it.

It looks that Yahoo Japan would switch its PPC services from Overture to MS’s AdCenter once the deal is made in Japan. This would be a great news to advertisers who are running campaigns targeting multiple markets, who are having to set up a separate account with Overture Japan in order to run PPC campaigns in Japanese market.

bing offers “cashback” services for shoppers. In Japan, the incentives such as “points” and “cashback” work really well, and we may see higher click through rate once the service begins in Japan, though it would probably take a while for bing and Yahoo to finalize the cashback alliance deal with local merchants. Where and how easy you can redeem the cashback pionts is the key.

• The term of the agreement is 10 years;
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;
• Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
• Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.
• Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites.
• Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first 5 years of the agreement.
• Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.
• Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country.
• At full implementation (expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory approval), Yahoo! estimates, based on current levels of revenue and current operating expenses, that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million. Yahoo! also estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual operating cash flow of approximately $275 million.
• The agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies. The agreement maintains the industry-leading privacy practices that each company follows today.

Perhaps Microsoft’s newly launched search engine “bing” will take over the search function on Yahoo portal is one of the immediate concerns to the search industry. And, I’m sure that search professionals targeting Japanese market are wondering how it will impact on search market in Japan.

Quite frankly, I don’t think we’ll see any changes to the search landscape and services in relation to this deals in Japan based on following facts:

• Softbank holds 40% of Yahoo Japan Corporation shares.
• Overture Japan is 100% owned by Yahoo Japan Corporation.
• The PPC advertisers on Yahoo and its ad network in Japan, have accounts with Overture Japan, and not running campaigns through Yahoo Inc.
• Currently, Overture serves the paid ads displayed on MSN/bing search result pages in Japan.

Some of the foreign (non-Japanese) businesses who heard the news about the deals may hesitate to advertise on Yahoo Japan or bing Japan in upcoming months, but it should soon go back to the norm.

Now, Yahoo Japan may see some benefits in collaborating with bing search. But, I imagine that would be done in the background rather than to putting a bing brand on Yahoo site. Bringing different brand into the well established Yahoo site could have a negative impact.

As mentioned above, they are already paid search advertising partners in Japan so there won’t be any changes. They may come up with display ads deals between the two companies, and that maybe the biggest changes we’ll see in Japan.

On the side note, Yahoo Japan’s share price is at $330 today compared to Yahoo Inc’s $15 and Microsoft’s $23 today. It doesn’t look that Yahoo Japan needs any help from Microsoft.

Paid or not, the “word of mouth” campaign using blog has been quite effective in Japan. Many people are aware that some of the bloggers may be paid to write the review, and still welcome the information especially since being compensated doesn’t mean that they’d write something that are not true. Several surveys done in Japan show that people trust and value what they read on blog posts, and often time what they read has an impact on their purchasing decision or action. I assume that Google Japan’s marketing team simply considered it as a promotional campaign, and nothing to do with a link building. (like they need more links to the site… for what reasons?) Though it’s sad that Google’s marketing team wasn’t aware of their own regulations.

I think that a point we should be discussing here is to whether such promotion should be “punished” as a link spam or not. Sure, downgrading Google Japan’s page rank seemed to work well as an example of what would happen to you if you do the same. But, if Google really believes that such campaign is nothing but a link building, how come they don’t approach to the company who offers such service, and bloggers who receive compensasion for the blog post. In fact, none of the bloggers were “punished” in any ways, and now the marketing company, “Cyber Buzz”, became well known through the news. (As of today, CyberBuzz’s page rank hasn’t changed.) Rather than to pretend punishing Google Japan, Google should put out the instruction in using such promotion campaign, and take real action to show that they don’t approve.

On CyberBuzz’s website, they uploaded a comment that they don’t pay blogger to write an article. They only pay when a blogger upload (promotional items such as) “parts” or “videos” onto the blog. In any cases, I think this type of promotion service will grow in Japan in coming years. It simply works in Japan.

The reason for my “but…” is that the engines never disclose the search volumes in Japan. The numbers came out from Japan market in past were all “number of accesses to the site”: “property popularity”and they didn’t represent the search related traffic. This is why Yahoo Japan, a popular portal site, has been mistakengly named as the popular search engine in Japan. Actually, Yahoo is also more popular (by number of PV) than Google in US, but no one point that out.

These engines still don’t officially announce the search volume, but I heard that the difference in search volumes between Yahoo and Google had shrunk to only 2-3%, which means that businesses targeting Japanese market must do well in both Yahoo and Google.

For the first time, I saw a data on Japanese search engines performance by search results page view. (See below.) Now, the numbers are not representing the search volume since some people may view multiple pages from one (1) search. Nonetheless, it’s a great data for marketers and advertisers.

[Search Result Page Views by Engines - Month of October 2008, Nielsen Online NetView]

• Yahoo Search – 3,536,499,000
• Google Search – 2,568,437,000
• MSN/Windows Live Search – 219,011,000
• goo Search – 144,852,000
• Biglobe Search – 97,199,000
• Nifty Search – 48,575,000
• Infoseek Search – 47,177,000
• Excite Search – 23,648,000
• Baidu Search – 47,380,000

Note: Search for goo, Biglobe and Nifty are powered by Google, and Infoseek and Excite are powered by Overture. The initial search may be conducted on the search top page, portal top page or from tool bars. Mobile search data is not included.

The data shows that Baidu is gaining the search market share. It may not be as quick as they’d like, but it already has more search page views than Infoseek and Excite. It could soon reach to the goo and MSN level. What data doesn’t show is the break down of the search categories. I’m assuming that the numbers include all the search result pages: web, category, image, video, news, music…  I’m guessing that Baidu is becoming popular through its video and blog searches rather than the web search.

The PPC advertisers in Japan should note that the PPC services on Yahoo site is still provided by Overture, which has a completely different ad network than Yahoo’s search network.

Not getting good search results was the top reason for using multiple search engines. About 25% said that what they want to search makes difference in which engines to use. Instead of looking at the page 2, they go to next search engine to search the same keyword phrase. (People looking for shopping and entertainment related information tend to use Yahoo, maybe? I know that B to B businesses usually do better with Google Japan.)

This results mean that if you are targeting Japan market, you need to do well (both SEO and PPC) with both Yahoo Japan and Google Japan, and not just one of them. It also shows that people are reading the search results closely instead of clicking what comes up at #1 or #2 automatically. Check your page description in search results for your target keywords to make sure it has a good description of the page.

This is Yahoo’s logo cheering for Japanese team. Japan’s Matsuda won bronze medal in the 200-meter butterfly.

This is Google Japan’s logo on top page today. Google.com has a logo with monkey on rings. It looks that they are using animals from Chinese Astrology.

The new Google Japan’s top page has 4 tabs below the search box. Each tab has several links with icon to some of their popular pages and tools such as Gmail, YouTube, Image search, Blog search and Calender. According to Google, the change was made in response to many feed backs from the users complaining the difficulty of finding tools and pages within Google. (Like Google.com, there were links to these tools and pages on the left top corner of the page, but not visible enough for Japanese users, I guess…)

I think this is a huge change for Google, not because of the layout change, but because it can be translated as their first step into a portal site. In fact, their tools such as Google map and Google earth, and YouTube acquisition have helped them becoming the #2 property in Japan for the first time in history last year. While most of the people still come to Google to search, other tools and services are definitely driving the access to the site.

Still, I’m a bit sad to see this change…

During the bata phase, Baidu’s robot crawled Japanese websites like crazy. It was so crazy that many site owners set a tag to avoid Baidu robot from crawling their sites. Since its official opening, they decreased the frequency of robot crawling, and some owners may already switched to let it crawl the site, but still Baidu’s index volume is probably far less than that of Yahoo Japan and Google Japan, which may be translated as “Baidu’s search results may be completely different from what you get from Yahoo or Google”.

Now, there are other reasons why Baidu may give you a different search results, i.e.; links doesn’t help much, but what’s most interesting to me is that their engine was developed in a double-byte character country, China, and according to Baidu Japan’s executive, they’ve refined the engine so that it understands the relevance between the search words and the page content, and that’s not necessarily by picking up the keyword in content. Both Google and Yahoo have been working on this, too, at their Japan lab, but not much more than picking up the keywords on page. I’m curious to see how well Baidu’s engine can grasp the content and ranks the pages accordingly.

In Japan, we used to have several search engines including some Japan’s original engines, and there was a time when all of them were doing well. However, after we lost engines such as Netscape, AltaVista and Lycos, and engines like goo and infoseek decided to go with Google, Japan’s search market has been dominated by Yahoo and Google for years. It’s also the fact that the algorithm of Yahoo and Google has become very similar, and as a result, you get exactly same or similar search results no matter which search engines you use. It can’t be good for the users.

I think that Baidu is on a right track by trying to give different search results to the search users. If their search results are different from what you get from Yahoo and Google, “and” the results are highly relevant to what you are looking for, I think that they have a good chance of gaining a market share in Japan.

Yahoo Days members aren’t as active as other popular SNSs in Japan such as mixi and Grree, and if and how many users they can maintain and hopefully gain in up coming months are questionable. I’m sure that they’ll add more functions (blog, image and video sharing, etc.) to it, which would make Yahoo Profile even more like a social networking service. However, it would still be another SNS site, and can deny the feel of Yahoo Japan being a follower in this area rather than a leader.

Yahoo Japan’s member database (Yahoo ID holders, Yahoo’s broadband users, Yahoo mobile users, etc.) is huge and is very valuable to many out side businesses. I think the real value of Yahoo Profile would come when they can combine all of these database, and release it to outside vendors.

Sure, MSN would love to get their hands on Yahoo users and advertisers, but just by combining two companies, would they become #1? I think not. Regardless of who you are or what business you are in, you need to know what you are doing wrong and why, what works for you, and what’s not. Most importantly, you need to know why your competitor(s) is doing better. Without knowing your strength and weakness, and that of competitor’s, the chances are, you’d make the same mistake again and again. Also, it’s important to know who you are, and what people (users, customers, etc.) think who you are. I think of Google as “search engine that offers other cool services”. I think of MSN and Yahoo as “portal sites with search function”. I hope if and when they merge, they’d further improve what’s working well for them, and come out as a brand new search power service.

Yahoo is doing well outside North America and Western Europe. In Asia, local search engines (Naver in Korea and Baidu in China) are doing far better than Google, Yahoo and MSN. Why is that? Maybe the key to success is not becoming bigger, but thinking smaller… instead of providing the one-slap service to everyone, give it a room to offer some unique services to each market.

Yahoo Japan entered the new year with their new home page, which has a stronger feel of the portal site than a search site. In fact, they got rid of the category list from the home page, and while it still has a search box right below the Yahoo Japan logo, my eye went straight to the news feed placed in a center of the page, and didn’t see a search box at all. Maybe they are trying to re-focus what they do best in 2008, which is to provide the overall services such as news feed, shopping, auction, etc.

Yahoo Japan has been one of the most visited websites in Japan for years, and many visits come from Yahoo BroadBand users who set Yahoo Japan as browser home page, and from services like Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Auction, and Yahoo E-mail. While SEO for the organic search is important, if you wish to reach Yahoo Japan users, Overture Japan’s paid campaign is definitely the way, and it looks that it’s more important now with Yahoo Japan’s new home page design than ever.

The longer answer to the question is…

Currently, there are 2 domain extensions available for Japan, “.xx.jp (such as .co.jp for companies and .ac.jp for schools)” and “.jp”. In order to obtain “.xx.jp” domain, you must have a physical address in Japan in addition to other requirements, while “.jp” domain is available for anyone in the world. Since “.jp” domain became available only several few years ago, and it wasn’t easy to obtain “.xx.jp” domain, many website owners went (and still going) with “.com” domain extension.

According to the domain survey in Japan (against 300 internet users between 20s and 50s) , 79 people responded that they had own registered domain. 67 people had “.jp” domain and 23 people had “.com” domain. The main purposes of obtaining a domain was to have their own E-mail address (62 people) followed by to use for web site (business or non-business, 19 people).

For foreign businesses, having “.jp” domain for their Japanese web site may work well in showing the seriousness of doing business with Japanese customers… it may even give an impression that the company is in Japan, in which case, the search users may choose to come to your site instead of other “.com” sites, but less likely since average search users only read the title and the description and not the domain name.

Back to the question. “Do ‘.xx.jp and ‘.jp’ domain rank higher in the search results than other domains?” Major search engines in Japan such as Google, Yahoo and MSN all have two choices in displaying the results: “All of the web” and “Web pages in Japanese language”. Unlike engines in countries like UK, France and Germany, there isn’t a choice for “Web pages in Japan only”. It means that you don’t have to have “.xx.jp” domain in order to rank in these search engines. In fact I haven’t had any difficulties ranking my non-jp domain client pages to rank well. Only time it may give you a push is in the local search, but if you are a foreign company, that’s not your focus anyway.

I’m not stopping people from registering “.jp” domain, but what more important are to rank well in the search results, and to have a site that won’t disappoint the visitors with issues such as usability, translation quality, and customer services.

• Is site (pages) in Japanese?
• Is site (pages) indexed by Google and Yahoo Japan?

While site/pages being indexed by the search engines is important, that certainly doesn’t mean that your pages would appear in the search results where you wish your page to appear. If you want your pages to show up in the search results for the search terms in Japanese, your page must include the search term in Japanese.

Both Google Japan and Yahoo Japan have two choices of search, “all the web” and “all Japanese pages” (note, it’s NOT “pages from Japan” so that your site doesn’t have to be hosted in Japan nor has “.co.jp” domain). When a search user set it for “all Japanese pages”, only the pages in Japanese, which include the search term will show up in the search results. Even when “all the web” is selected, if the search term is in Japanese, the page must have the search term in Japanese in order to be included in the search results.

Google and Yahoo’s search robots crawl sites by tracing links. If your site has a decent links coming from other websites, these engines should eventually find your site. Since having quality incoming links from relevant sites helps to improve the ranking of your pages in the search results, in my opinion, the efforts should be put to increasing the quality incoming links and not to submitting the site information to these engines. (Sure, you can still submit the site URL to these engines from their webmaster page.)

Again, let’s think about why you want your site to be indexed by the engines. Site being indexed should be one of the steps to be found in the search results, and not be the goal. As variety of studies and researches show, if your page doesn’t rank in top 10 search results, it’s highly likely that people won’t find you from the search. What bring people to your site is not the fact that your site is indexed, but the optimization work with thorough Japanese keyword research.

I entered “Def Leppard” in the search box – ’cause I love them Top 10 results for “What?” included pages about Def Leppard from Wikipedia (Japanese page), Amazon, Universal Music, Hatena Diary, YouTube (English page) and some personal websites. Tope 10 results for “Who?” were very similar to that of “What?”, but the description was more about the band’s history. I didn’t see Def Leppard’s official website anywhere. It looked that it was designed to pick pages in Japanese.

The pages in the results for “When?” all had some dates (concert date, CD release date, etc.), and the pages in “Where?” results had dates and places such as concert and auction. The pages in “Why?” results all had words such as “because” and “that’s why”, and majority of the top 10 results for “How” were auction pages.

I know that it’s just a test version and just started, but I was a bit disappointed to see not much differences between some of the result pages. I’m sure they’ll make improvements to the search results in future. Otherwise, I don’t see the need for 6 different result pages.