Showing that not even the best performers always get it right, BMW Germany fell foul of anti-webspam measures last week and found itself delisted in Google’s index.
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The world’s most popular search engine is on a mission to eliminate pages from its search index that have artificially high rankings as a direct result of dubious search engine optimisation techniques.
After a sustained period addressing English language pages, Google has now turned its attention to international sites.
In this case, Google found BMW used techniques that presented substantially different pages when the search engine visited compared to real human visitors. These doorway pages violated the company’s webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle that says: “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”
Matt Cutts, a senior Google employee said: “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. We’ll probably also need some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded.”
In a worst-case scenario, search engine experts believe BMW Germany could find its pages removed from the index for several weeks if not longer.
