BMW crashes its Google ranking

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 6 Feb 2006 at 13:20

BMW and other manufacturers face delisting from Google's index for their shabby web activities.

Google engineer Matt Cutts writes in his blog that BMW's German website was somewhat duplicitous, presenting different pages to Google's search bot than it does to actual viewers.

Cutts alleges that Google's bot leafing through the BMW site would see pages filled with car-related keywords. But an actual visitor would have their browser redirected to the page they were expecting. Thus, BMW must have been hoping to boost its rankings when users searched these keywords.

Google says this type of shenannigans goes against its principles and removed the site from its index on Saturday morning. Searches for bmw.com.de proved fruitless, demonstrating that this is indeed the case. Apparently printer and camera maker Ricoh is looking at the same treatment for similar offences.

Cutts writes that BMW appears to have already taken steps to clean up the website, but that there were large numbers of these pages to clear out, so it may be some time before the site is acceptable again.

Cutts says that the European domain of a US car-maker was also facing the Google axe for its use of hidden text, but apparently changed its ways just a couple of days shy of its 30-day deadline.

The crack-down is part of an ongoing campaign to weed out web spam in non-English languages.