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Google Delists BMW-Germany

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the wild-wild-west-of-internet-search dept.

Raenex writes "The car maker BMW has had its German website bmw.de delisted from Google. The delisting was punishment for using deceptive means to boost page ranking, which has now been set to zero for BMW. Matt Cutts, a Google employee who works to stop unethical search manipulation, originally reported the delisting in his blog and suggests that camera maker Ricoh is not far behind."

4 of 613 comments (clear)

  1. Blog Link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    Sheesh.

  2. Why? SE Cloaking / Stealth is slimy by Saeger · · Score: 5, Informative

    So, Google delisted bmw.de for doing something that "Search Engine Optimizers" call SE cloaking or SE stealth. This is where you show the search engine crawler one keyword-loaded thing, but then show the normal user another thing; usually this is done by looking at the HTTP_User_Agent server-side, but in this case bmw.de was doing it with client-side javascript redirects.

    IMO, they and many others deserve to be delisted for attempting to game the system. The only SE tactic more disgusting is spamming blogs for free pagerank boosts.

    The best legit means to increase your rank is simply to have quality content that people WANT to link to, and which is intelligently marked up (e.g. use header tags for important stuff; not sliced up images that semantically mean nothing).

    --
    Power to the Peaceful
  3. Re:Google != Microsoft, sorry by toddestan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Then when are they going to "delist" Experts exchange, a site that often comes up for technical questions, but does not allow the answer to be seen without a subscription.

    Actually, you can view the responses to atleast some of the questions on Expert Exchange. Just keep scrolling down past the several pages of ads and other crap. I still don't like the site though.

  4. Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th by pocopoco · · Score: 5, Informative
    One of the other sites reporting on this mentioned:
    In BMW's case the doorway page contained the word "gebrauchtwagen" - meaning "used car" in German - over 40 times. The real home page, to which searchers were seamless redirected, only contained the word twice.

    Sounds like fraud to me.