Quite often, I receive inquiries and requests to submit the site information to Japanese popular search engines on their behalf. Whenever I receive these requests, I check following before I reply to them:

• Is site (pages) in Japanese?
• Is site (pages) indexed by Google and Yahoo Japan?

While site/pages being indexed by the search engines is important, that certainly doesn’t mean that your pages would appear in the search results where you wish your page to appear. If you want your pages to show up in the search results for the search terms in Japanese, your page must include the search term in Japanese.

Both Google Japan and Yahoo Japan have two choices of search, “all the web” and “all Japanese pages” (note, it’s NOT “pages from Japan” so that your site doesn’t have to be hosted in Japan nor has “.co.jp” domain). When a search user set it for “all Japanese pages”, only the pages in Japanese, which include the search term will show up in the search results. Even when “all the web” is selected, if the search term is in Japanese, the page must have the search term in Japanese in order to be included in the search results.

Google and Yahoo’s search robots crawl sites by tracing links. If your site has a decent links coming from other websites, these engines should eventually find your site. Since having quality incoming links from relevant sites helps to improve the ranking of your pages in the search results, in my opinion, the efforts should be put to increasing the quality incoming links and not to submitting the site information to these engines. (Sure, you can still submit the site URL to these engines from their webmaster page.)

Again, let’s think about why you want your site to be indexed by the engines. Site being indexed should be one of the steps to be found in the search results, and not be the goal. As variety of studies and researches show, if your page doesn’t rank in top 10 search results, it’s highly likely that people won’t find you from the search. What bring people to your site is not the fact that your site is indexed, but the optimization work with thorough Japanese keyword research.