BMW.de banned form Google

[vexor]

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 – including cached copies of many of the keyword-stuffed doorway pages, like bmw.de/bmw-kauf.html, which now return a “file not found” message. Most of the pages can still be accessed from Yahoo’s cache, while others – like a doorway page stuffed with the phrase “BMW review” – are missing from Yahoo’s cache, but can still be accessed at Archive.org if you disable JavaScript.

This penalty is a good example of what can happen to sites going against the Google webmaster guidelines – no matter how big or important one might deem the site. Google writes:

“If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or ’throwaway’ domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index.”

In a nut-shell, Google’s guidelines go back to a single philosophy: webmasters should optimize for humans, not machines, because Google doesn’t like to be cheated. The irony here is that BMW.de is a highly inaccessible site right from the front-page: a JavaScript-only navigation prevents access by certain browsers, browser settings or media (such as handheld browsers), and it also prevents search bots from effectively crawling the site. It might well be that BMW’s doorway pages were a reaction to the otherwise inaccessible site structure; needless to say, the worst possible reaction.


- Article (http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-02-04-n60.html) from Google Blogscoped (http://blog.outer-court.com)

[exhausted mules]

owned

[Mattk]

Haha. Serves them right for making ridiculously expensive vehicles.

[fsandys]

Haha! Someone who heads the web development will be in trouble!

[crayzayjay]

Chins up BMW!

[draak666]

Haha. Serves them right for making ridiculously expensive vehicles.
Is this a car nut talking?

Reminds me of an article I read called 'Cheap Porsches for everyone!' It's about the rising real estate prices in Belgium and how some people seem to think that everybody should be able to purchase a house of their own. Well, the free market doesn't work that way, I'm affraid. You want something you'll have to pay for it!

Which is exactly what BMW will do in order to get BMW.de back on top of the Google search.

[RC45]

And now you know why some of us call Google "smoke and mirrors".

years ago, you used Google to get accurate info rounded up from various web sources.

Today you use Google if you want to be directed to the most well advertized and paid up commercially listed Google page.

BMW should take Google to court over this obvious attempt to undermine their business and sabotage their bottom line.

Google is the enemy here - not BMW or it's webmaster.

[fsandys]

You have a point, I mean, it shouldn't need almost 'hacks' to get to the top if you are obviously a top hit for that search.

I totally agree that Google is getting far to big and now there is no way to guarantee good search ratings without shovelling money at them.

Sucks to be honest.

[jakaracman]

Heh ...
But on the other hand: Google likes to presenet itself as the best way to find anything on the net. And them prevents you from finding bmw.de. Weird.
I think they should find any other way of punishment. Why don't they just sue BMW for fraud, reset page value to na normal level for that kind of page and let us fid it next time we use Google?

[RC45]

Heh ...
But on the other hand: Google likes to presenet itself as the best way to find anything on the net. And them prevents you from finding bmw.de. Weird.
I think they should find any other way of punishment. Why don't they just sue BMW for fraud, reset page value to na normal level for that kind of page and let us fid it next time we use Google?

Just Yahoo or Microsoft Search ;)

[LotusGT1]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/

JavaScript-cloaking...

[Toronto]

i did a search on google, and it came up as the 3 result for me.
google isn't very smart. any german who would want info on bmw germany won't be searching for 'bmw germany' :wink:

[RC45]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/

JavaScript-cloaking...

But just who died and made Google Interweb Search-Ethics God? -- Especially when you can just buy a top listing with them. :roll:

It's time for another search engine to dethrone this Google crap once and for all - almost as bad as eBay... and PayPal etc etc..

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html#quality


Webmaster Guidelines
Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

Design and Content Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
Check for broken links and correct HTML.
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Technical Guidelines:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.
When your site is ready:

Have other relevant sites link to yours.
Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta) project. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quality Guidelines - Basic 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?"
Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

[LotusGT1]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/

JavaScript-cloaking...

But just who died and made Google Interweb Search-Ethics God? -- Especially when you can just buy a top listing with them. :roll:

It's time for another search engine to dethrone this Google crap once and for all - almost as bad as eBay... and PayPal etc etc..

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html#quality


Webmaster Guidelines
Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

Design and Content Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
Check for broken links and correct HTML.
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Technical Guidelines:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.
When your site is ready:

Have other relevant sites link to yours.
Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta) project. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quality Guidelines - Basic 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?"
Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.



It was a mere statement of Google's policy. It was not me agreeing with them :P

[RC45]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/

JavaScript-cloaking...

But just who died and made Google Interweb Search-Ethics God? -- Especially when you can just buy a top listing with them. :roll:

It's time for another search engine to dethrone this Google crap once and for all - almost as bad as eBay... and PayPal etc etc..

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html#quality


Webmaster Guidelines
Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

Design and Content Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
Check for broken links and correct HTML.
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Technical Guidelines:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.
When your site is ready:

Have other relevant sites link to yours.
Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta) project. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quality Guidelines - Basic 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?"
Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.



It was a mere statement of Google's policy. It was not me agreeing with them :P

In keeping with our anti-radical middle-eastern nutjob spirit of co-operation, I was not "rolling" my eyes at you.. ;) - but rather Googles policy :)

And to further add to the confusion I am quoting the post in it's entirety - including the secitons not related to our current discussion ;) :)

[Mattk]

Yeh, Google are depriving us of decent search results because of their vindictive behaviour. And now BMWs will be even more unaffordable.

[fsandys]

Lol guys watch the quoting!! :shock:

[RC45]

[quote:7ef1719315="fsandys"]Lol guys watch the quoting!! :shock:[/quote:7ef1719315]

Say what?

[vexor]

^^^ whoa, trippy RC45

[fsandys]

Haha! :P RC45

[LotusGT1]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/recent-reinclusions/

"I appreciate BMW’s quick response on removing JavaScript-redirecting pages from BMW properties. The webspam team at Google has been in contact with BMW, and Google has reincluded bmw.de in our index. Likewise, ricoh.de has also removed similar doorway pages and has been reincluded in Google’s index."