Google has blacklisted BMW after it caught the luxury car maker trying to artificially boost its popularity ranking on the search giant's website.
The delisting was confirmed in a blog post by Google software engineer Matt Cutts. Cutts wrote that the methods used by BMW were a violation of the search engine's quality guidelines, specifically the principle of "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users." The blog also said that a second company, camera maker ricoh.de would shortly be removed for similar reasons.
A number of big publishers and website owners enlist the help of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts to help improve search appeal in search engines. While most methods are acceptable, some are deemed to be unethical. The BMW websites have been caught employing a technique used by black-hat search engine optimizers - doorway pages that trick search bots like Google's into boosting the PageRank of a site or a page, and directing searchers there. These so-called black hat tactics are commonly used by gambling or pornography sites.
The blacklisting informally known as the "Google death penalty" - means that a Google search for terms like "BMW" or "BMW Germany" will not return a direct link to the company's German website, bmw.com.de. Also, bmw.com.de's PageRank, the algorithms that assign every page on the web a sort of popularity ranking, has been reset to zero.
The higher a website's PageRank, the more likely it is to feature at the top of the page of a Google search. Sites boost their PageRank by virtue of being linked to by other highly ranked sites.
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The delisting was confirmed in a blog post by Google software engineer Matt Cutts. Cutts wrote that the methods used by BMW were a violation of the search engine's quality guidelines, specifically the principle of "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users." The blog also said that a second company, camera maker ricoh.de would shortly be removed for similar reasons.
A number of big publishers and website owners enlist the help of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts to help improve search appeal in search engines. While most methods are acceptable, some are deemed to be unethical. The BMW websites have been caught employing a technique used by black-hat search engine optimizers - doorway pages that trick search bots like Google's into boosting the PageRank of a site or a page, and directing searchers there. These so-called black hat tactics are commonly used by gambling or pornography sites.
The blacklisting informally known as the "Google death penalty" - means that a Google search for terms like "BMW" or "BMW Germany" will not return a direct link to the company's German website, bmw.com.de. Also, bmw.com.de's PageRank, the algorithms that assign every page on the web a sort of popularity ranking, has been reset to zero.
The higher a website's PageRank, the more likely it is to feature at the top of the page of a Google search. Sites boost their PageRank by virtue of being linked to by other highly ranked sites.
Source
