German BMW Banned From Google
Filed Under (Sites Banned by Google) by admin on 06-02-2006
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From what it looks like, the German websites of car maker BMW have been kicked out of the Google index. BMW.de at this time has a PageRank of 0. A search for BMW Germany, which only days ago yielded BMW.de as a top result, now doesn’t show any sign of BMW.de at all. Instead, BMW.com – BMW’s international site – is on top for this search.
The reason for the ban is likely to be that the BMW websites have been caught employing a technique used by black-hat search engine optimizers: doorway pages. German and international bloggers last week were quick to spread the news.
As you may know, a doorway page is stuffed full of keywords that the site feels a need to be optimized for; however, as opposed to real pages, this doorway is only displayed to the Googlebot. Human visitors will be immediately redirected to another page upon visit. And that’s exactly what happened at BMW.de, as reported Wednesday.
While BMW almost immediately removed the pages after the news broke (after having them live for almost 2 years), apparently it was too late. German BMW are now suffering what is known as the “Google death penalty”: a ban from almost any imaginable top search result, and a degrading of the PageRank to the lowest possible value.
Consequently, a search for gebrauchtwagen bmw, which had a page at BMW.de as top result on Wednesday last week, now shows AutoScout24.de as top result. (Interestingly enough, the second result at this moment is the report on this blog.) A search for BMW.de using Google’s site operator doesn’t yield any results, either. (Note that sometimes, different Google data centers return different results, so this change may not yet be visible on all of Google.)
How many pages exactly are affected by this is hard to tell, but a search on Yahoo for BMW.de returns 41,500 pages – including cached copies of many of the keyword-stuffed doorway pages, like bmw.de/bmw-kauf.html, which now return a “file not found” message. Most of the pages can still be accessed from Yahoo’s cache, while others – like a doorway page stuffed with the phrase “BMW review” – are missing from Yahoo’s cache, but can still be accessed at Archive.org if you disable JavaScript.
This penalty is a good example of what can happen to sites going against the Google webmaster guidelines – no matter how big or important one might deem the site. Google writes:
“If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or ’throwaway’ domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index.
BMW, Back in Google
BMW has been talking to Google/ Matt Cutts and apparently filed a reinclusion request (formal or informal) – they’re back in Google with BMW.de, as Christian Mayer notes in the forum. Ricoh.de is back as well. Matt says:
“I appreciate BMWs 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 has also removed similar doorway pages and has been reincluded in Googles index.”