Google’s Penalty for German BMW site

Google has dropped BMW Germany from its search engine after realizing the top car manufacturer’s German website (bmw.de) was breaching its guidelines by artificially boosting its popularity ranking.

Investigations by Google found that BMW’s German website manipulated search engine results to ensure top ranking when users searched for the keyword “used car.”   Redirects using Javascript was the reason that BMW’s website was dropped from Google’s search engine. Google highlighted that this was in violation of Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines, which clearly specify the issue of deceiving users or search engines by showing different content to each also called cloaking.

Google has now reduced BMW’s German page rank to zero, thus the company website no longer appears at the top. It  means BMW will need to start again and build up its ranking from scratch. A very costly exercise not only in re-optimization efforts, but also in lost revenue and exposure. BMW admitted using the so-called “doorway pages” to boost search engine rankings, but denied any attempt to mislead users.  BMW’s activities  and the penalties were revealed in a blog by Google software engineer Matt Cutts.

This should be a clear warning that, whether you are undertaking your own optimization efforts or employing a company to conduct your search engine marketing for you, you better confirm that the techniques being used are ethical and inline with the guidelines of Google and other search engines. So the message from Google is very clear -  ‘Do not deceive’ – and do not resort to any black hat techniques such as cloaking or doorway pages.