Google Bans BMW for Search Spamming
Matt Cutts has a hardcore spamming feature on his blog about Team Webspam at Google removing the BMW.de site from its index for spamming practices (Google is also removing Richoh.de). Matt writes that BMW was using an old school cloaking java redirect tool which attempts to serve the search engine bots a bogus age of keyword text, then sends the user to a pretty page of car listings.
Matt writes (with excellent screenshots) : It appears that at least some of the JavaScript-redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google’s webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages.
Matt notes that the BMW site’s pages now do not have the redirect as they have taken it off in reaction to the Google delisting. The redirect scam was a direct violation of this master rule of the Google Webmaster Guidelines “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”
If the Google Guidelines were the 10 Commandments, the rule that BMW broke would be comparable to the “Thou Shalt Not Kill” rule. BMW’s site was running completely obvious search spam, but my question is this : was this a stupid decision by BMW to run this junk or a stupid decision by their web marketing manager to contract an SEO company that does not have half a clue as to what they are doing?
Comments
6 responses so far ↓
Mikey on Feb 6, 2006 at 2:51 pm
I know of alot of big UK companies spamming/cloaking too. The list is pretty big and Google has never done anything about them. Take a look at: www.thomascook.com, www.Boots.com, www.virgincosmetics.com, www.mytravel.com, www.bradford-bingley.co.uk, www.thewhitecompany.co.uk, etc. The list goes on. They’re all hiding content. Check Google’s cache for any of those homepages, select ‘cached text’ and you’ll see exactly what I mean. They’re all the work of an seo agency called Ambergreen who really should be banned right away if Google has any sense.
Nicholas Gillard-Byers on Feb 7, 2006 at 10:25 am
Even as an atheist, I’m pretty sure the “master rule” of the Ten Commandments would be “I am the Lord thy God” or whatever particular variation people prefer. An especially appropriate commandment given Google’s move here.
Pat Mcgee on Feb 7, 2006 at 10:54 am
Saying that cloaking is ethical is like saying that knives are ethical. It depends how you use them. But they should have known it could very easily get them banned, and for that they are just stupid. Ethics don’t apply.
SEO-3.com » Non-Geek SEO Tips… - Google Bans BMW for Search Spamming on Feb 9, 2006 at 11:12 pm
[…] Spamming
Filed under: SEO — jdunn @ 4:09 am
Google Bans BMW for Search Spamming Search Engine Journal - Feb 06 6:53 AM G […]
Jellyfish » Blog Archive » How Google Profits from Irrelevance on May 4, 2006 at 3:48 pm
[…] The article cites estimates that “robot-generated spam consists of anywhere between one-fifth and one-third of the Google index” and indicates that Google is “engaged in an arms race with search engine optimizers.” But I wonder, is this web spam actually bad for Google? And are Google (and Yahoo! for that matter) really out to get the SEO industry (like posts here and here indicate)? Do they really want to destroy SEO as a whole or even the worst kinds of SEO like web spam? […]
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