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Google Delists BMW-Germany
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."
You could at least add a link to the blog entry you mention. Like, say, this one.
Sheesh.
I kind of wish they would delist the whole 'blogosphere too, or at least allow us to set an option to not show 'blogs in our searches. I mean, pagerank abuse is rampant on 'blogs (example)(.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Oh, is this why Miserable Failure still goes to President Bush? I see they really have a guard on deceptive search methods there at google, but I wonder why their stock is tanking...
I really like Google, their philosophy, and their ethics.
I really and truly dislike deception. Its very common, especially when money is involved for some reason.
To me, I look at "work" simply. Work is getting paid for doing things for people that they appreciate. The more unique or the more quality or quantity of things that you bring to people, the more money you will get.
Much of advertising is deceptive. 99.999% of SPAM is completely deceptive. And personally, it really irritates me. Don't get me started about the snail mail I get with things like "Check enclosed". Grrrr.
At least here in the US, BMW is a very desired car. Many consider it a status symbol. Their slogan here is "The Ultimate Driving Machine". I don't know what their status is in Germany.
Good for Google, bad for BMW. TFA says that Ricoh might be next for delisting. One thing I wish Google would do is get Froogle out of beta, and separate the search results for buying things and having information about things. Believe it or not, when I do a search for a digital camera or some other product, I may want to learn something about the product before I buy it. And yes, I do use Google for searching for something to buy. I've found $2-3 parts to fix things that I simply could not have found at a local store.
I'm wondering if BMW is actually at fault here, or if they were using a Search Engine Optimization company
What's the difference?
It is, however, an occasion to look at the growing power of Google (and remember, perhaps, that such a large amount of power in the hands of one company can be dangerous, regardless of intent).
I don't think we have too much to worry about. The power Google has in this is because it is the most popular search engine. As soon as they start abusing the power and delisting major sites, then there will certainly be another search engine that will take its place. So it is in its best interest to behave well.
The bottom line is that Google wants to be the best search engine it can be. It doesn't do that by not indexing mass amounts of companies. It also doesn't do it by alowing webmasters to get themselves at the top of the results just because of some tricks. So it must walk a fine line. In fact its best bet is to delist one or two high profile companies and make a big deal about it, so that it discourages other companies from following them.
In related news, after being de-listed, the headquarters of BMW Germany ceased to exist. People coming to visit the headquarters found only a vast, dark vortex of nothingness, over which were visible huge glowing letters reading "Error 404: Page Not Found". The entire German management of BMW has disappeared as well, along with several nearby dairy farms and a brewery.
At a press conference, a reporter asked whether this sort of behavior fit with the company's "Do no evil" motto, or reflected a growing arrogance and malice on the part of Google. The Google spokesman declined to respond to the question. Instead his eyes briefly glowed red before the reporter spontaneously burst into flames and was consumed, leaving only a small pile of ashes on the floor.
The remaining reporters had no further questions.
No one makes the argument because BMW is taking advantage of another company, Google, at Google's expense. BMW gains more hits on their web site b/c their PageRank is higher, and Google suffers because word of abuse like this reduces the quality of their searches and the repuration of their search engine. Therefore, to protect their own interests, Google shut down the offender. Both companies were working to maximize the profits of their shareholders, but one was trying to take an action counter to the other's interests, and so the other (Google) responded.
"This brings up some thorny issues in my mind. Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank."
Bollocks. If you design your web site in such a way to properly and openly reflect your business or whatever, no problems. If you attempt to defraud or otherwise screw search engine results then google (and hopefully other search engines) has every right to get shitty. From a consumer perspective I want my google results to best reflect what I am looking for. If google has to delist fraudulent web sites to improve my search results, then they are just doing a good job.
In no way is Google telling you how to design your web site. What they are saying is that they have a requirement of what google will index. They want to know that the pages that are indexed by them are what the site will show you. IOW, Google is saying that they want to be fair to their customers (you and me). This is part of their clause (do not be evil). But some sites are run by idiots and will look at how they can cheat the search engines. They want high rankings in some areas, without really having it. That is what porn sites do. They try to have links to themselves for things such as Linux, Microsoft, etc, but the site has NOTHING to do with these. That is cheating, and that is what BWM was doing.
Evil? Off hand, I would say that Google is STILL the top
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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
>Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank.
You know its "Google rank" as in Google determines the ranking of the page.
>In effect, google is dictating the terms upon which the entire web must operate
Its the users who still determine how the web operates. "We" determined Google is a good search engine and use it. Its quite easy to stop using Google if it starts giving bad information. "I'm looking for BMW in Germany, but Google sucks for that, I'm moving on to another search engine." Before Google there was another most popular search engine (Yahoo? Alta Vista? some Inktomi based site?) and it could easily change again.
I'm all for bashing Google, but its Google's ranking, its their choice.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Google isn't the only search engine. If you'd rather use a search engine that turns a blind eye to abuse and constantly have your results filled with false positives, be my guest.
I for one hope all the search engines take aggressive steps to curb and suppress the effectiveness of artificial hacks to improve results. If spamming isn't rewarding for the companies, maybe they'll learn to spend their resources on improving things like page readability, content and functionality instead.
Bonus points for sounding well educated, but I hope you realize that you've basically discovered the principle that companies strive to improve profits. Anything less would be bizarre.
Google has achieved its remarkable success by focusing on customer satisfaction and the end user experience. The whole reason they are so powerful is because the average joe trusts them to do a lot of filtering and ranking so as to provide valuable search results.
That's a very simple point, and I didn't use any fancy "functions of self interest," but a lot of people seem to have a hard time understanding it. This situation is similar to the hypothetical case where Roger Ebert stops reviewing movies from, say, MGM, because they start providing him with different versions of the movies than they actually release. In that case, he'd have every right to say "because I can't accurately review the content which is delivered to my audience, I won't review it at all."
Google is a company (wow!). They want to achieve profits and shareholder value (oh no!). So far, they have accomplished those by offering a customer experience that is superior to their competitors, thereby gaining more eyeballs and ad revenue. This bit of news is exactly in line with what they've always done, albeit more high profile, and seems to indicate that they value the quality of their DB above, say, ad revenue from a gigantic company (should BMW choose to boycott ads).
I found your "discovery" that "over the next few years" Google will have self-interest as a priority, and the implied derision baseless. Can you elaborate on why that's a bad or surprising thing? What, exactly, do they owe you that you think they won't deliver?
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
That's like if Microsoft decided to cut off sales of Windows SDKs to an application software vendor who it decided didn't play by the rules... but of course, they're free to develop desktop applications for other operating systems.
I'm amazed by the hordes of people who like Google-bashing. Nope. Microsoft has constructed a high barrier to entry in their market. You have to overcome application compatibility, user retraining, and lack of Microsoft applications (which means your business documents aren't necessarily compatible).
Google is a search engine. Going to Google is going to a website. If they get even slightly less good than someone else, users can easily go elsewhere -- as evidenced by how quickly Google took over from Yahoo and Altavista.
Google isn't shafting users here. They are working to provide incentive *not* to hire search engine spammers and keep information useful. If the alternative is letting me get shafted by search engine spammers, Google is doing the right thing.
If they provide a clear set of rules, spammers will work up to the very edge of them. If they simply let people know that severe, repeated abuse will result in a penalization in their own database, they reduce spam in their database. I'm all for this move.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Sounds like fraud to me.
The 'whims' of Google's that you're complaining about are just common sense. Google says, make your page clear and informative. If your page is clear and informative, guess what? Google ranks it higher. If your page is clear and informative and has something interesting to say, other people will find it interesting and link to it. If other people link to it, guess what? Google ranks it higher. Google says, don't change your URLs too often. That's common sense, too. If you ceaselessly redesign your site, leaving old URLs dangling as 404 errors, you're hurting people who link to you, and you're hurting people who've bookmarked you. That's common sense, too. All my bookmarks to my bank's site no longer work, because every time they do a redesign they change their URLs, and leave the old ones dangling. Sooner or later, that's going to annoy me enough to make me change banks.
If you do a Google search for 'Simon Brooke', you'll find me at the top although my home page is just that, a personal home page, and has no 'optimisation'. Simon Brooke the Insurance Broker, with an expensive, professionally designed site, comes second. Then there's Simon Brooke the professional actor on IMDB, then a guy who's into aeroplanes, then Simon Brooke the author.
So with all those people with something to sell in the list, how come I and the aeroplane geek make the first page? My site is simple and has been there a long time (more than ten years now, and on the same URL for eight). In that time a lot of people have linked to it, and it doesn't suffer link rot. The plane geek's page gets ranked well because he has good pictures which presumably get linked to.
And that's the lesson for all you soi disant web designers out there. Users aren't impressed with your fancy, flash 'splash pages', and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with text as graphics, and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with vacuous marketing puff, and guess what? Google isn't either.
If you've got something interesting and different to say, and you say it clearly, and you say it consistently in the same place, Google will find you. Tricks and cheats aren't needed.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.