After trying to cheat its way to the top of the search engine pile, BMW has been dropped from global search engine, Google.
The German car manufacturer was booted off Google after it had employed the same kind of tactics used by porn sites to try and artificially inflate search engine rankings.
BMW’s dodgy practices were detected by Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google who explained how the company had violated Google’s webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”
As he explains in his blog, search engine ‘bots’ arriving at the BMW site would see a page full of keyword-loaded text, which had been optimised to ensure a high search engine ranking.
But what the search engine saw and what greeted visitors were two quite separate things, as a piece of JavaScript would immediately redirect visitors to a completely different website.
Keyword-optimised ‘fake’ pages created purely to attract search engine robots are known as ‘doorway’ or ‘gateway’ pages and have long been employed by the porn industry to boost the profile of a site.
Google’s ‘delisting’ of BMW means that searches for terms like “BMW” or “BMW Australia” will now only return results for the global site and not regional sites.
Moreover, bmw.com.de’s PageRank – an algorithm used by Google to assign a ‘popularity ranking’ to every page on the web – has been reset to zero.
It’s probable that BMW enlisted the help of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts who use a variety of cunning tricks to boost a client’s search engine ranking.
Although there are many perfectly fair and legal ways of optimising a site’s search engine ranking, it’s not unusual to see less ethical “black hat” tactics being employed, usually by dodgy gambling and pornography sites.
BMW now have the dubious honour of becoming one of the highest profile companies to have a website effectively blacklisted by Google, by having their all-important PageRank reset to Zero (German camera manufacturer ricoh.de are also set to be delisted).
Matt Cutts’ blog reports that at least some of the JavaScript-redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, but before they can be ‘reincluded’, Google’s webspam team will need a ‘reinclusion request’ along with details on who created the doorway pages.
Although it’s good to see search engine cheats getting slapped down, in reality it’s not going to make a great deal of difference to BMW in the long term. But we suspect that some P45 forms are being handed out as we speak…