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?
