BMW back in Google favour

By Alun Williams

Posted on 9 Feb 2006 at 11:27

BMW has been reprieved from its Google death penalty. At the start of the week, the world's media attention was turned towards BMW's webspamming activities, which were highlighted by Google - BMW crashes its Google ranking. BMW, however, has now polished up its act to Google's satisfaction.

Enter BMW as a search term in Google and the German auto manufacturer does indeed appear top of the lists, having temporarily been relegated from sight.

In his blog, Google engineer Matt Cutts had highlighted the example of BMW as part of his company's attack on webspam in languages other than English. He described how 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 another page altogether. Thus, BMW must have been hoping to boost its result rankings when users searched on such keywords.

In a further addition to his blog, however, Cutts has writen: 'I appreciate BMW's quick response on removing JavaScript-redirecting pages from BMW properties. The webspam team at Google has been in contact with BMW, and Google has reincluded bmw.de in our index.'

Likewise, ricoh.de - which was also highlighted as an offender in the original blog - has removed similar 'doorway pages' and is reincluded in Google's index.
Cutts repeats, however, Google's intentions to continue its efforts on webspam in non-English languages.