Google blacklists BMW

BMW's dodgy practices were detected by Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google who explained how the company had violated Google's webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users."

As he explains in his blog, search engine 'bots' arriving at the BMW site would see a page full of keyword-loaded text, which had been optimised to ensure a high search engine ranking.

But what the search engine saw and what greeted visitors were two quite separate things, as a piece of JavaScript would immediately redirect visitors to a completely different website.

I find it really odd that even when the search engines tell you directly what they really want to see, that folks still want to cheat the game.

influence of $ ... although shortsighted in the long run.

It got them a lot of links though

Personally I couldn't see G keeping BMW out for long. Can you imagine going to Google searching for BMW and not finding it?

It got them a lot of links though

Them = bmw, google, matt cutts

... excellent example of link bait by one person ...

But was this a result of BMW's error in SEO (or maybe ignornace of SEO best practices) or did they hire an SEO company to rep them, and that company crapped the bed?

Wonder if there are any new 6-series coupes in Mountain View today...LOL

I think they can afford the sweet 7 Series in Googleland!

Other sources say that they used Java redirects with spammy content. I don't know if it was an SEO company or an in house employee that was responsible.

The Google action came just two days after BMW were outed in some other SEO blog. Google reacted to that, rather than unilaterally.


In Matt Cutts blog he also mentioned another (US) car company that had already been banned, had now cleaned up and was going to be reincluded.