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the doorway page contained the word "gebrauchtwagen" - meaning "used car" in German

Apparently, the people at that other site don't seem to understand much German, and don't know how to use a dictionary either. According to the original blog the abused term was "BMW Neuwagen", meaning "new BMW car(s)".

But anyway, I agree:

Sounds like fraud to me.

And it's good that Google also takes action against such big corporate sites. The message has a better chance to be heard by everyone.

> While this is against the googles terms of service, I can see how someone might think this was a perfectly valid way of countering the fact that google wasn't indexing their site well.

The thing is that the "doorway pages" were stuffed full of german keyword terms like "used cars" and the content was repeated over and over again, with only the model names substituted.

It is garbage. If BMW didn't like the fact that pages didn't work as designed, they should have redesigned them, not presented a totally different set of content to the search engine bots.

Also, you seem to suggest that Google was at fault because it couldn't index the content properly, when, in fact, no search engine could index the site as is as it was designed.

Matt Cutts has a screen cap on his blog -

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-intern ational-webspam/

wheel Said,

January 30, 2006 @ 5:24 am

Just so folks are clear, Matt's posting this for a reason. I posted on another blog that Matt had stripped out the links to the designer in the theme he uses here. He patiently explained that in fact the version he downloaded didn't have the links (my downloaded version did).

I publicly apologized in the other blog, and am doing so again here. Sorry Matt.

You could at least add a link to the blog entry you mention. Like, say, this one.

Sheesh.

When a search engine visited a page like www.bmw.de/bmw-neuwagen.html, it would see a page like this: [image of page with lots and lots of keywords]

The funny part is that it let's you do it already. Those "customizable buttons"? You can make them do pretty much whatever you want, URL-wise, including take the text from the search box and insert it into multiple URLs to grab as keywords for searching them.

All it takes is a tiny bit of XML.

Matt Cutts offered his take on this article here where he talks about how Google can diagnose a lot of these black hat activities automtaically without any human intervention.

Personally, the "better mouse trap" addage definitely fits here. Black hat SEOs won't ever be stopped because of the way the web works currently. What I am wondering is when will domains that have a really early create date but are inactive are going to be realized for their SEO potential down the road. Older domains are definitely moving to the top of the list since the last Google update.

You might want to check that again. Google didn't even become a company until late 1997.