Motoko’s weblog

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 »

Because of the nature of my business, when I talk about the Website Localization, I usually talk about SEO related issues such as the importance of the keyword research, the accuracy of the translation, and the issues related to domains and hosting.

When it comes to the Search Engine Marketing and Online Business in general, we tend to focus so much on how the website is crawled and indexed by the Search Engines, and the rankings on the search result pages. Perhaps, too much focus on SEO against engines, and forget that the website is there for people.

Localizing Forms

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Japan’s advertising giants, Dentsu and Hakuhodo DY Holdings announced the plan to strengthen online advertising in 2010. Dentsu announced the plan to increase Internet-related sales from March 2009 150 billion yen to 250 billion yen by March 2014. Hakuhodo DY also stated that it will double the Internet-related sales from this term’s about 60 billion yen by March 2014. Traditional advertisement mediums continue to underperform, and have no indication to revive any time soon. CONTINUE READING »

I just posted my presentation about the Search in Japan from International Search Summit in London last month.

As you can see, my presentation shows bunch of numbers, which don’t mean much to you unless you were in the audience. Here’s what I talked about.

Market:
94 million Internet users
75.3% Penetration rate
4% access Internet from TV and gaming devices
73.4% on Broad Band
90% of CONTINUE READING »