順位 · The Brief — Weekly Japan SERP Intelligence Archive
The weekly Japan SERP brief, archived since 2019.
Every Tuesday, 141,800+ SEO professionals open Ranking Japan to decode what Google.co.jp and Yahoo! JAPAN did overnight — algorithm shifts, ranking volatility, and the keyword demand moves no one else catches.
Published every Tuesday · Free · No fluff, no recycled takeaways · Reader since Issue 001, January 2019.
Fig. 1 — JP-SERP Volatility Index, week of 13 Jan 2025. Source: Ranking Japan proprietary index, daily crawl of 1.84M keywords.
Current Issue · No. 287 · 14 Jan 2025
Yahoo! JAPAN's product-panel expansion quietly reshuffles 14% of commercial SERPs.
A late-January layout shift on Yahoo! JAPAN's shopping surfaces is reranking the same keyword set Google.co.jp treats as stable. We tracked 1.84M keywords through the change and pulled the 12 verticals where the divergence is widest.
- The headline: Yahoo! JAPAN product panels now occupy 38% of above-the-fold real estate on commercial queries, up from 24% pre-shift.
- The risk: Brands optimising only for Google.co.jp lose 6–11 positions on Yahoo! JAPAN for the same query within 72 hours.
- The opportunity: Five verticals — 家電, コスメ, 保険, 転職, and 不動産 — show a 3.4× lift in long-tail visibility from a single PDP schema block.
Archive
Recent issues — 検索 · back catalogue.
Browse the last four weeks of the weekly Japan SERP brief. Every issue is dated, indexed, and built around a single thesis on what's moving in Japan search.
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Why Google.co.jp's December core update hit コスメ harder than any other vertical.
We dissected 42,000 cosmetics queries through the December 2024 core update and isolated the four content signals that separated the 12% of winners from the 31% of losers — including an E-E-A-T pattern Japanese brands are still underusing.
Vertical deep-dive -
Yahoo! JAPAN vs. Google.co.jp market-share, Q4 2024: the gap closes to 4.1 points.
Our quarterly market-share series — now cited by four of Japan's top five digital agencies — showed Yahoo! JAPAN's search slice rising for the third consecutive quarter. We mapped the demographics, devices, and query types driving the shift.
Market share -
The 転職 SERP is no longer a 10-blue-links game — and the new layout has a clear winner.
Job-board SERPs on Google.co.jp now feature 6 unique surface types in the first viewport. We tracked 8,200 転職 keywords for 30 days and named the schema block the top three job boards all adopted within a week of each other.
SERP feature -
Local pack contraction in Tokyo: only 2 map results now show for 61% of 「近く」queries.
Google.co.jp quietly shrunk the local pack for 「near me」-style queries in dense Tokyo wards. The implication for multi-location brands: the third position is no longer visible on mobile in 7 of 23 Tokyo wards.
Local SEO
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Yahoo! JAPAN doesn't copy Google.co.jp — it competes with it. Treat the two engines as separate ranking problems, not a single SERP with two skins, and your 家電 strategy stops bleeding share on every Tuesday. The brands still optimising for one engine and praying the other follows are paying for the gap in lost impressions we measured at 14% this quarter.
By the numbers
Six years of weekly Japan SERP intelligence, in four figures.
1,920+
long-form SERP analyses published since January 2019
1.84M
unique Japanese keywords tracked daily across Google.co.jp & Yahoo! JAPAN
141,800+
email subscribers as of Q1 2025 — including SEO teams at Mercari, Rakuten, Recruit, Sony & LINE
47%
average weekly open rate on the brief, vs. a 21% industry benchmark
Founded 2019 in Shibuya, Tokyo · 12 full-time analysts & 4 contributing editors · Winner, Asia Search Awards 2023 — Best Use of Search in Publishing.
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One issue, every Tuesday at 09:00 JST. Five sharp reads on what moved in Google.co.jp and Yahoo! JAPAN, plus the one chart you'll forward around the office. Free, no upsell, unsubscribe in one click.
Join 141,800+ SEO professionals at Mercari, Rakuten, Recruit, Sony & LINE · Read by teams at 4 of Japan's top 5 digital agencies · Cited by Nikkei Digital Gear, ITmedia Marketing & Web担当者Forum.