Search giant Google has "blacklisted" German car manufacturer BMW for breaching its guidelines.
Google has removed BMW’s German site, www.bmw.de, from its search index for allegedly engaging in deceptive tactics to increase its rating. Investigations by Google found that BMW’s German website influenced search results to ensure top ranking when users searched for "used car." Google has now reduced BMW’s page rank to zero, ensuring the company no longer appears at the top.
Matt Cutts, a Google employee, revealed the removal in a recent blog posting. The move is indicative of Google’s attempt to combat spam in other languages in 2006, according to Cutts. He said BMW.de had been removed last week because certain pages on the site would show up in a certain way when the search engine visited the page but then, when a web user opened the page, a redirect mechanism would display a completely different page.
The automaker’s German site included “doorway pages”, those that redirect Web surfers to a different site, according to Cutts. When a search engine visited particular pages on www.bmw.de, it saw text-heavy sites that repeatedly featured words like Neuwagen, which is German for new car. But, "a user’s browser would immediately trigger a JavaScript redirect to a completely different URL," that displayed more pictures than text, Cutts said.
Do Not Deceive:
Cutts wrote that the practice violates Google’s guidelines, particularly the principle that states: "Do not deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users." Google’s guidelines also specifically include an item that recommends that website creators do not employ cloaking or sneaky redirects. According to published reports, however, BMW denies the claim.
In mid-January, Cutts wrote in his blog that he was offering a courtesy notice to designers of non-English language sites that starting in 2006; Google would be paying closer attention to tricks that go against its guidelines. Another German site, www.ricoh.de, will soon be removed from Google’s index for similar reasons, according to Cutts.
A BMW spokesman admitted using the so-called "doorway pages" to boost search rankings, but denied any attempt to mislead users. “The company used the doorway pages, which are created to do well in searches for particular phrases and direct users to a final website.”
But the spokesman insisted the company’s intentions were honorable.
We did not provide different content in the search results to the final website, Markus Sagemann told the BBC News website. However, if Google says all doorway pages are illegal we have to take this into consideration.
On Google’s own website the company lists a series of quality guidelines. First among those is a requirement to design websites for users, not for search engines.
A Google spokesperson confirmed via email that the BMW.de site has been removed but would not comment further on the specific case, adding that Google cannot tolerate sites that try to manipulate search results.
The quality of our index and search results is of the utmost importance to Google, the company said in a statement. Google would continue to strive to protect the accuracy and quality of its results, it added.
The automaker already has removed some of its redirection pages, but Cutts expects that Google’s Web-spam team will need a re-inclusion request, detailing who created the doorway pages. Before the domains can be reinstated, however, Google probably will "need some assurances that such pages would not reappear on the sites," Cutts wrote.
BMW’s German website, which is heavily reliant on javascript code unsearchable by Google, used text-heavy pages liberally sprinkled with key words to attract the attention of Google’s indexing system.
However, once a user clicked on the link displayed in Google’s results window, they were redirected to a regular BMW Germany page, which contained far fewer of the key words.
Removing BMW.de from the Google database sets a high-profile example, because BMW’s website practices have been discussed online for years, said Hellen Omwando, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Nevertheless, Google’s actions do not tackle the source of the problem, she said.
Google needs to focus on enhancing its algorithms to deal with this kind of situation, because right now BMW is not the only company that does this, she said. In addition to better technology, Google should add some human editors to help prevent manipulation, Omwando added.
The doorway-pages approach is one of the more popular, yet disruptive, techniques that a Web site can use to bolster its search engine ranking, according to Sapna Satagopan, research associate at Jupiter Research. Companies commonly employ such techniques to try to ensure that their sites rank first when users search for them she says.
Part of the problem that Google faces, however, is that there is a fine line between site optimization and tricky practices that manipulate results.
"With this coming into light…there is a lot of work that BMW would have to do to handle that kind of a [PR] backlash and to make sure…that they clarify how they are going to handle it, how they are going to approach the problem, and how quickly they are going to resolve it and reassure the webmaster community that they will be following those guidelines from here on."
Two of the broader ways for marketers to increase search engine rankings without employing spam techniques are to ensure that the Web-site architecture is clean and to use reputable sites in their communities to link to them, according to Satagopan. "As they try to increase their efforts and make the results cleaner, it is more important for the marketer, whether it is BMW or any other marketer, to make sure that they conform to guidelines and stick to them."
Testing Times
The action against BMW comes as Google faces criticism over its expanding activities.
Last month Google unveiled a new Chinese site, agreeing to Chinese government restrictions on search results. The company’s shares fell sharply on Wall Street after the California-based firm announced a $9m drop in profits, falling short of expectations for the first time.
It also bought a 5% stake in AOL, worth $1bn, fuelling fears of preferential treatment for AOL within Google searches.
Google has also remained quiet over accusations that business rivals have manipulated its click-based advertising system.
While the BMW.de situation points to the control Google has on the type of information that users can access on the web, Omwando said that if Google takes that too far it will only hurt itself.
Google is saying, ‘We are the gatekeepers, if you will, of the information on the web and if you would like to be a part of that database you need to step in line,’ she said.
However, if Google prevents users from accessing information they seek, they will look elsewhere for that information, she notes.
Currently, a Google search for "BMW Germany" turns up BMW’s international web page first and a link to a story about BMW.de being removed from Google’s index second. A Yahoo search turns up BMW.com first and BMW.de second.