BMW receives Google death penalty
Oops. The big, bad wolf, a German automaker who apparently has been deceiving unsuspecting Little Red Riding Hood
(Internet users) for at least a couple of years, has been caught by the woodsman (Google) and had its ranking with the
woodsman's search engine axed to zero.It seems that BMW has been using a technique known as a “doorway page” on its bmw.de homepage. The technique, used by less-than-ethical websites, provides a keyword-rich page for search engine web bots such as Google's. But the page is only for the ‘bots; flesh-and-blood visitors are directed to another page.
Google, which posts policies against such deceptive practices, reacted swiftly once it received the news and has put BMW under what is known as the “Google death penalty”. The article provides more information on both the penalty and the incident.
Although BMW has removed the offending pages, there has been no official explanation released by the automaker.
[Thanks for the tip, starlightmica.]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
worldbusinessforsale.com 7:30PM (2/16/2006)
Bmw is back in google!
worldbusinessforsale.com team
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bud 5:21AM (2/17/2006)
A big company is back in google in a very short time.
Is normal.
http://www.bmw.de can't be down and even is, for a shirt time only.
http://www.referatele.com/referate/drept/online3/drept1.php
http://www.referatele.com/referate/geografie/online6/geografie5.php
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pagerank-prediction.com 2:42PM (2/24/2006)
Great publicity for Bmw!
We are from; http://www.pagerank-prediction.com/
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Jason 1:29PM (2/05/2006)
Sooooooo just so we're clear, helping the Chinese gov't with information blackouts on it's citizens is ok, but BMW's page is evil?
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IK 3:57PM (2/05/2006)
But when you search for BMW on google, it shows as #1?
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DKB_SATX 4:44PM (2/05/2006)
It would seem that they've already rescinded the "death sentence", or that it applied only to the direct bmw.de site, because a google search for "bmw" yields www.bmw.com as the first non-sponsored link.
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starlightmica 5:46PM (2/05/2006)
It was bmw.de, the German site that got punished.
http://www.google.com/search?q=bmw.de -> no results
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=bmw.de&btnG=Suche&meta= -> no results
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=bmw&btnG=Google-Suche&meta= -> a bunch of BMW results, bmw.de nowhere to be found
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Nick 6:28PM (2/05/2006)
I'd like to thank Google for deciding who I get to see in my search results.
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David Zatz 6:39PM (2/05/2006)
Regarding Google - they were the ONLY major search engine to not give in to a Federal "fishing expedition" demand for irrelevant and personal information, which puts them pretty high in my book. EVERYONE doing business in China conforms to their tyrannical rules, and I suspect sooner or later people will be saying that about people doing business in the US... we just won't hear about it.
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Joey (Kev) 5:52AM (2/06/2006)
Thank you for protecting us all, Google. We love how you decide what is best for us. It feels like having another father. It is so comforting. And thumbs up on China, I suppose (but who am I then to have an opinion of my own, Chinese people don't seem to need one anyway).
I just deleted Google from my bookmarks and I won't be back.
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God 9:02AM (2/06/2006)
bmw > google
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dusty bottoms 11:39AM (2/06/2006)
you guys are dumb.
google is trying to make sure that what you receive in terms of search results is relative to your keyword. bmw.de could have any keyword they wanted in their meta tags (ferrari, paris hilton, pretty doggies) and would be listed as a result.
and remember, it's .de, so unless your searching in german, you probably wouldn't have noticed it.
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dusty bottoms 11:44AM (2/06/2006)
you guys are dumb.
google is trying to make sure that what you receive in terms of search results is relative to your keyword. bmw.de could have any keyword they wanted in their meta tags (ferrari, paris hilton, pretty doggies) and would be listed as a result.
and remember, it's .de, so unless your searching in german, you probably wouldn't have noticed it.
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David S. 12:23PM (2/06/2006)
Re #5 above... You left out an important word in your comment:
"I'd like to thank Google for deciding who I get to see in my [GOOGLE] search results."
Of COURSE they decide, who else should decide that for them? They didn't try and shut down the BMW site, you can still get there if you'd like. You just can't use THEIR search engine to find it. Repeat after me: "Google is not the internet".
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Noah 1:23PM (2/06/2006)
Google should make an example of them and axe all of their pages to 0.
They already would have had the #1 spot, it's not like people don't know where to go to find a bmw online. frigg
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