Google Bans BMW For Shady SEO Work
February 7th, 2006 by admin
The Luxury Automaker Is Feeling the Pain of No Search Traffic
BMW was banned from Google’s index for shady search engine optimization work after the Super Bowl on Sunday.
The car manufacturer created a page, stuffed it with keywords, and had it redirect to another page that was significantly different than the page the searcher thought they were getting.
BMW Germany’s offense? It apparently showed one page–a "doorway"–to Google’s search crawler, but another to visitors. The doorway was allegedly loaded with the keywords "used cars," but the company then redirected visitors to a different landing page.
Google blogger Matt Cutts first wrote about the development this weekend, saying that the tactic violated Google’s quality guidelines, which state that Web sites shouldn’t show different pages to search crawlers than to users.
A BMW spokesman told Forbes that the company had not done anything wrong. "We do not understand why Google has decided this," the spokesman was quoted as saying.
Posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 8:40 am
In Auto Warranty