German BMW Banned From Google

[geekerati]

From what it looks like, the German websites of car maker BMW have been kicked out of the Google index. BMW.de at this time has a PageRank of 0. A search for BMW Germany, which only days ago yielded BMW.de as a top result, now doesn’t show any sign of BMW.de at all. Instead, BMW.com – BMW’s international site – is on top for this search.

The reason for the ban is likely to be that the BMW websites have been caught employing a technique used by black-hat search engine optimizers: doorway pages. German and international bloggers last week were quick to spread the news.

As you may know, a doorway page is stuffed full of keywords that the site feels a need to be optimized for; however, as opposed to real pages, this doorway is only displayed to the Googlebot. Human visitors will be immediately redirected to another page upon visit. And that’s exactly what happened at BMW.de, as reported Wednesday.

While BMW almost immediately removed the pages after the news broke (after having them live for almost 2 years), apparently it was too late. German BMW are now suffering what is known as the “Google death penalty”: a ban from almost any imaginable top search result, and a degrading of the PageRank to the lowest possible value.

Consequently, a search for gebrauchtwagen bmw, which had a page at BMW.de as top result on Wednesday last week, now shows AutoScout24.de as top result. (Interestingly enough, the second result at this moment is the report on this blog.) A search for BMW.de using Google’s site operator doesn’t yield any results, either. (Note that sometimes, different Google data centers return different results, so this change may not yet be visible on all of Google.)

How many pages exactly are affected by this is hard to tell, but a search on Yahoo for BMW.de returns 41,500 pages...

Source

[physik3r]

They violated Google's web quality guidelines by spamming keywords and using javascript redirect. The whole story can be found here : http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

[andrew247]

Mmmmm...BMW are a reputable company...why did they do this?

[geekerati]

Seems stupid of them, since they were already at the top or near it. BMW really doesn't need to advertise much because they are such a proven commodity. Tons of repeat business, too.

Greed!

[zima]

Originally Posted by andrew247

Mmmmm...BMW are a reputable company...why did they do this?

Ever heard of "right hand doesn't know what left hand is doing"?

Probably some marketroid is behind all this, not much with BMW itself...

[sbhavishro]

But BMW admitted they have done it but they dint mislead the people they said. But BMW wont have much effect I think altough it is big and reputable company and they have other channels of promotions also

[cruocitae]

Don't worry because of BMW

[komodo9]

Originally Posted by zima

Ever heard of "right hand doesn't know what left hand is doing"?

Probably some marketroid is behind all this, not much with BMW itself...

Exactly, probably an outsourced web-dev company.

They're back included again now though. I think the entire ban only lasted a few days.