BMW Site Yanked From Google's Index

2/6/2006, by Nate Anderson

German carmaker BMW is better known for well-built automobiles than for deceptive web practices, but it's the latter that landed them in trouble with Google this week. The search giant removed BMW's German website from its index after looking into reports from German bloggers about the site's widespread use of "doorway" pages designed to boost BMW's PageRank.

BMW developed a set of pages stuffed with words designed for search engines—words like "neuwagen," which means "new car" in German. When the Googlebot crawled such pages, it would read the text and index them. Human web surfers, however, would be redirected via Javascript to some other page, one without the long strings of words, and most would never even realize they had been redirected (example). This is an old and obvious technique used by operators of dubious web sites to boost their rank on search engines, and it is certainly surprising to see it used by a company of BMW's caliber. What is even more surprising is that it's been going on for almost two years.

Once the word got out, the news soon reached the ears of Matt Cutts and the members of the Google webspam team. They looked into the allegations and decided that BMW was quite clearly violating Google's quality guidelines, which include these two principles:

* Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

The punishment was in effect a Google death sentence—the site was removed from Google's index. A search for "BMW Germany" now brings up the company's international portal as its first result instead of the German version of the site. BMW has already begun to mend its behavior, and may soon have BMW.de ready for re-inclusion in the index. Cutts says that will only happen when certain conditions are met.

"It appears that at least some of the JavaScript-redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google's webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We'll probably also need some assurances that such pages won't reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded."

The striking thing about this case is that it shows just how much power Google now has, and not just in America. The threat of being yanked from Google's index is enough to make multinational corporations change their online behavior (and their websites). Google has grown powerful enough that it can, in essence, dictate web coding practices. The company has no plans to stop the webspam crackdown, either; Cutts' blog entry hints that Ricoh may be next.

Courtesy - arstechnica.com