Mediarun Search Marketing News

Search engine marketing goes global as Google retains Chinese licence

July 9th 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

Search engine optimisation (SEO) specialists operating in China must have breathed a huge sigh of relief this morning as Google managed to maintain its business licence in the country.

The spat between Google and China has been long running and every SEO agency around the globe has been keeping a close eye on how things have been developing between the most populous nation and the most popular search engine.

Google ran into trouble when it began redirecting traffic from its highly censored Chinese landing page to the more liberal Hong Kong-based service. Communist government officials were unhappy with the move and were ready to ban Google from operating in the country entirely.

But it wasn't just Google that appeared to be bending the rules. The search engine giant accused Chinese cybercriminals of hacking into email accounts, in what was described as a "highly sophisticated" coordinated attack.

Now that the issues appear to be resolved and Google has held onto its operating licence, the mood appears to have lightened in the search engine camp.

"We are very pleased that the government has renewed our [internet content provider] license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China," Google wrote on its blog.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the company, Jessica Powell, said: "I don't think we gave anything up."

"We asked the government to renew our license to make some products that don't require any censorship. We are going to continue to offer uncensored web search with google.com.hk."

As well as being a bonus for Google, which saw its share price jump by four per cent, the news is great for search engine marketing firms.

But it's not all plain sailing. Recently a number of companies filed complaints against Google over its market-dominating practices.

Amongst those filing complaints against the search engine giant are UK price-comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine Ejustice.fr and Microsoft's Ciao.

So it looks like while Google may have signed a truce in China, a battle front could be opening up in Europe - especially now the European Commission is investigating Google's privacy policies.

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