Search Engine Optimization News Blog

China is really cracking down on Google and associates, period.

The Chinese government has apparently used the “Great Firewall” to block Google, YouTube and Gmail for a couple of days this week, according to a report from Fox News.

Access to Google both in English and Chinese was blocked for part of Wednesday and Thursday in parts of China. This is just another temporary ban in a long line of bans on Google and it’s affiliates out of China.

Fox News stated, “The outages occurred after China accused the Internet behemoth of spreading pornography among its citizens. Google was said to be investigating the service disruptions.”

China has its own internal search engines and the government has strict control. After months of concessions, back and forth wrangling and downright battles over what constitutes pornography, Google has acknowledged it is censoring search results in the country.

Again according to Fox News, Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang said Google China “is a company operating within China to provide Internet search services, and it should strictly abide by Chinese laws and regulations.”

Britain’s Telegraph also reported on the situation, saying that Google agreed to filter results demanded by the Chionese government based on government censorship restrictions and various content requirements  when they established the localized search engine Google.cn four years ago, but Chinese officials say that Google has circumvented the filter due to the presence of links to Google.com.

According to the U.K. Guardian, “Google China’s website has not installed filters to block pornography in accordance with the laws and regulations of our nation,” said the CIIRC – the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre. “A lot of overseas Internet pornographic information has spread into our nation by way of this website.”

Google could be losing a major consumer market which is just now coming online (half the world population lives in China). Google had said they would address China’s requests but it may be too late with the Chinese governemnt apparently fairly happy to simply keep banning Google and with Baidu ready to fill the empty space.

According to a commenter on TechCrunch, “a person seemingly located in Xiamen, China” said “Google Books, Google Talk and Image Search have also been blocked in the comment section of this post. Other services like Blog Search, Translate, Maps and Analytics are reportedly blocked as well. YouTube has been blocked in the country for quite some time already”.

What will Google do to remedy their sad situation in China?