Google Japan Penalised by Google, for reasons unknown.

What affect did it have on Traffic Referrals in Japan?

[David_M]

Google Japan Penalized by Google for Paid Links
[searchenginejournal.com...]

"How did Google Penalize Google Japan? They dropped their PageRank from a 9 to a 5"

[phranque]

WebmasterWorld front page thread:
Google penalizes google.co.jp [webmasterworld.com]

[Woz]

The "controversy" of Google inadvertently penalising one of its Country Specific sites is being covered in the other main thread, so it is of no value to duplicate that discussion here.

But I am wondering if there was any noticeable affect on Traffic Referrals for people targeting Japan, or if this was but a technical blip that was noticed only by the SEO/SEM community and went unnoticed in the real world.

Anyone notice any ripple effect?

Onya
Woz

[bill]

I'm looking at the peaks and troughs of SE referrals in my stats and I'm not seeing anything unusual yet on an overall level of referrals from all google properties.

Even in the Japanese SEO press this barely got a mention. People weren't even making any serious comments about it that I saw. It came across as a non-event from what I've read.