14 DAY TRIAL // Google takes a pretty clear stance against paid links, the practice of buying and selling links to and from other websites in order to build up traffic and possibly search engine rankings, and has enforced that stance on numerous occasions. In an interesting development, Google has had to stand by its own rules and has penalized itself, most recently the Japanese version of the search engine, which has had its Toolbar PageRank lowered since February last year. The penalty has now been lifted as Search Engine Land spotted.
Last February, reports started coming in of a 'pay-per-post' campaign run by a Google.jp affiliate to promote one of its products. Google Japan hired Cyberbuzz, a marketing firm, to promote an embeddable widget which listed the top 10 hottest keywords on the search engine at any one time. Part of the promotion, several bloggers were paid to post about the widget. Google was behind Yahoo in Japan at the time and was going all out to snatch some market share.
The practice, though, was a big no-no for Google which allows paid links only in several clear cases. The company says it's not against the practice of buying and selling links as long as they aren't used to manipulate search results. As such, these links have to either have the rel="nofollow noopener" attribute appended or redirect to a page which blocks search engines through the robots.txt file.
Google was put in the position to follow up on its own policies and decided to penalize Google.jp by having its PageRank dropped from 9 to 5, a significant amount. This is the PageRank value which shows up in the Google Toolbar and is not a direct representation of the value Google uses internally for the search engine. It looks like the penalty has been lifted as Google.jp now has a PageRank of 8 after the December 31 update, 11 months after it started.