Google updated their blog post on China saying the Chinese government has renewed their licenses to operate in China. Google said they “are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China.”

When Google stopped censoring their search results, they were afraid the Chinese regulators would not be happy. Google took the approach of redirecting users automatically to Google Hong Kong, which does not need to be censored. Chinese authorities told Google they cannot do that, so Google set up an arguably deceptive manual redirect instead and that seemed to do the trick.

Chinese authorities have renewed their license, which was first acquired in June 2007.

The Wall Street Journal has some additional insight into this news.

Related Topics: Google: Business Issues | Google: Outside US | Top News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz