BMW Site gets Google Death Penalty

[cd34]

Google 'death penalty' for BMW site

By Stephen Hutcheon
February 6, 2006 - 12:10AM

Luxury car maker BMW has had its German website blacklisted by Google after it was caught trying to artificially boost its popularity ranking on the world's leading internet search engine.

The delisting was reported by several bloggers and later confirmed in a blog post by Google software engineer Matt Cutts wrote that the methods used by BMW were a violation of the search engine's guidelines.

continued...

http://smh.com.au/news/breaking/google-death-penalty-for-bmw-site/2006/02/06/1139074113688.html

[Toby]

Not a real brilliant move. I suspect a there will be some pink slips for those in charge of bmw.com.de

[dunkin]

Hey gang,

Beware, no cheating on Google. Google removed BMW's web site from its index for violating their guidelines against trying to manipulate search results. Nice that it doesn't involve an adult site.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20060206/tc_pcworld/124621

Have fun,
dunkin

[Wazza]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

[Wazza]

And it's good to see our precious Sydney Morning Herald got one fact out of ten correct...

Doorway pages improve PR and PR gets you more google traffic... thanks chief...

[RawAlex]

What I don't understand is this: The java script redirect was entirely language independant. This isn't an issue of a german redirect or anything like that. Why would this site have been included with this redirect anyway?

Alex

[Halfdeck]

Omwando said that if Google takes that too far it will only hurt itself. "Google is saying, 'we're the gatekeepers, if you will, of the information on the Web and if you'd like to be a part of that database you need to step in line,'" she said. However, if Google prevents users from accessing information they seek, they'll look elsewhere for that information, she notes.

I keep hearing this tired line of attack from black/grey hats. It's the garbage doorway pages littering the top listings that make it hard for surfers to find what they want. Clean up the SERPS and more surfers will run their searches on Google.