Offical Partner
05.02.2006 |
BMW is offline
Google takes the gloves off: Since yesterday the entire website bmw.de is not available anymore through Google.
Already on Jan 11, 2006, Matt Cutts, Chief Software Developer of Google Search, announced in his weblog that Google will in the future take a more aggressive stance against dubious methods for international website optimization. Yesterday, the unexpected happened: Google removed BMW from their index.
Reason for this measure is the coding of many webpages, where through massive utilization of keywords, doorway-pages and javascript-forwardings the search ratings are increased. This kind of optimization reminds of earlier methods of the sex and gaming industries, where keywords were written explicitly for search robots but remained invisible to normal visitors. The trigger was a posting in a blog by Philipp Lenssen. Another hint on the increasing importance of weblogs in today communication reality.
Technical backgrounds to the BMW manipulation kann be found here.
„Punish one, educate a hundred“ Mao is quoted. Should Google keep this strict policy, a few more well known names should perish from Google.de, for example the printer company Ricoh with ricoh.de – what actually did happen in the interim. Probably Googles reaction is as draconic as well for the simple reason that they themselves are under heavy public scrutiny for their support of censoring practices e.g. in the Chinese internet. BMW at least reacted and has removed the doorway-pages as a start. Google usually “penalizes” by a 30-90 days exclusion, in some cases also much longer.
Among the customers of the responsible „search enginge optimizer“ are T-Online, Henkel, Glaxo and Sat 1. The coming Monday will be a long and stressful day for their e-marketing departments.
Archieved under: PQ+ Internal