Google has blacklisted BMW.de after BMW violated its guidelines by using a technique that could artificially boost its search engine rating, according to a Google employee.
In a blog post, software engineer Matt Cutts said that Google had removed the German BMW site from its Web index after it included "doorway pages" that would automatically redirect visitors to a different URL.
Cutts explained that when Google's crawlers visited a BMW page, it saw blocks of text with repeated key search words such as neuwagon, which means new car in German. However, when a user visited the listed page they would be automatically redirected to another page with less text and more pictures, which was more attractive than the page the crawler saw, but would have scored lower in Google's PageRank system.
"This is a violation of our Webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of 'Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users,'" said Cutts' blog.
To regain Google listing status, Cutts expects BMW.de will have to remove the JavaScript that redirects users around the site in this fashion, and send a reinclusion request to Google's Webspam team, which Cutts leads. BMW.de has already removed some of the redirect pages.
BMW may also have to disclose details of who created the doorway pages, and give assurances to Google "that such pages won't reappear on the sites", before the domains can be reincluded, said Cutts.
The German site of technology product vendor Ricoh is also due to be removed from Google "for similar reasons", revealed Cutts.
BMW and Ricoh were unavailable for comment at the time of writing.
Talkback
"Cloaking" - i.e. delivering a different page to the search engine rather than to visitors - is risky. But google does "automatics redirects" as well. For example,
I wanted to see if my site was available at google.cn, but whenever I entered that URL in the address bar I was automatically directed to google.com (and with no explanation of why either).
That's not quite the same as cloaking, but it's just as deceptive. What did Cicero end his speeches?
Google is simply too powerful, and the only thing BMW's site did wrong was to get caught, according to the SEO handbook.
Oh yes, "And google must be destroyed!"