BMW given Google 'death penalty'

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BMW given Google 'death penalty'

Postby vukasin on Wed Feb 08, 2006 9:46 am

Search giant Google has "blacklisted" German car manufacturer BMW for breaching its guidelines.
Investigations by Google found that BMW's German website influenced search results to ensure top ranking when users searched for "used car."
Google has now reduced BMW's page rank to zero, ensuring the company no longer appears at the top.
BMW admitted using so-called "doorway pages" to boost search rankings, but denied any attempt to mislead users.
BMW's German website, which is heavily reliant on javascript code unsearchable by Google, used text-heavy pages liberally sprinkled with key words to attract the attention of Google's indexing system.
However, once a user clicked on the link displayed in Google's results window, they were redirected to a regular BMW Germany page, which contained far fewer of the key words.

Source BBC.co.uk (more here)


Hm, i think that is correct, but is also cruel. They worked for years to get ranking 8.

Few years ago, i was doing SEO for some travel company and i was doing almost same thing, but, company politics was against that, so i stoped it.
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Postby De Kus on Wed Feb 08, 2006 10:51 am

I hate these keyword pages. But kicking out pages like the one from BMW don't hurt the user, bceause its just one domain, meaning it should give 1 main hit (with some subpages), but some pages use something like a keyword page webring and you get 10 hits for the same page just on diffrenz redicret mirriors. Thats really anoying.
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Postby Blake on Thu Feb 09, 2006 1:41 am

I agree it's pretty annoying getting the same page 10 times. To tell you the truth I don't think it really matters. I mean anyone who can afford a BMW and who wants one dosn't really need google to find out how to buy one...or where to get one for that matter.

Though I do think this sets an example and will hopefully stop more people from doing it in the future.
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