Jaws dropped last week upon the news Google penalized its own Japanese site in Google search results after discovering Google Japan participated in a pay-per-post blogging scheme. WebProNews Video caught up with Google’s anti-spam-team captain, Matt Cutts, who offers his apologies.

“Certainly there were a lot of angry, upset, disappointed people within Google,” Cutts said about the situation, which led to Google Japan dropping from a PageRank 9 to a PageRank 5, the first time Google has ever had to penalize itself for violating its own terms of service.

“Speaking for me personally, I was mortified. I was just very, very upset about it. To the extent I can personally apologize, I do apologize for the fact that this happened.”

Google Japan hired a Japanese company called Cyberbuzz, who paid bloggers as much as $100 to write about a new search widget. This was a clear violation of Google’s rules, which Google has aggressively and publicly enforced over the past couple of years, much to many directory operators’ chagrins. 

Click to Read More