Google Delists BMW-Germany

Raenex writes "The car maker BMW has had its German website bmw.de delisted from Google. The delisting was punishment for using deceptive means to boost page ranking, which has now been set to zero for BMW. Matt Cutts, a Google employee who works to stop unethical search manipulation, originally reported the delisting in his blog and suggests that camera maker Ricoh is not far behind."

Although this seems "reasonable" in light of the..

perfidity that BMW was perpetrating, it also illustrates the large and growing power of google, a power that may not always be used for optimal "goodness."

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

You wanna elaborate on how this isn't "good"?

They were spamming, they broke the rules google set, bammo, pagerank=0.
They're still listed on Yahoo (and other search engines).

If google nuked the pagerank of someone who isn't intentionally spamming, like slashdot, we'd all have a right to be screaming bloody murder. But this makes perfect sense.

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

"This brings up some thorny issues in my mind. Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank."

Bollocks. If you design your web site in such a way to properly and openly reflect your business or whatever, no problems. If you attempt to defraud or otherwise screw search engine results then google (and hopefully other search engines) has every right to get shitty. From a consumer perspective I want my google results to best reflect what I am looking for. If google has to delist fraudulent web sites to improve my search results, then they are just doing a good job.

Re:No, Google is only dictating how you Do No Evil

Actually, this search [google.de] reveals that bmw.de is not listed on Google, period, and that's definitely BMW's official site for Germany... Of course, they haven't de-listed bmw.com, which does link to their German language site.

I see absolutely no reason to blame Google in this instance. Redirecting certain users based on the client they are using to different content is directly against the spirit of the 'net... Redirecting to different data based on the users' client can be good for only a couple of things: 1) joke sites that tell IE users to switch to some other browser 2) intelligent redirecting to a page with mostly the same content, but formatted to be friendly to portable devices.

Pagerank whoring aside, I still think BMW's web designer was in the wrong--as if there could be any confusion about bmw.de in the first place, I'm sure there's a half bazillion German websites linking to that site, putting it at place #1 by default. I guess that it's just a matter of Google breaking their foot off in BMW's ass for being stupid.

Re:No, Google is only dictating how you Do No Evil

His original point is still valid. I am Google's user. Google is looking out for my interests. I don't care whether BMW gets screwed over in the process, and I'd *enjoy* seeing search engine spammers getting screwed over.

Google is thus continuing to make *my* life good. Which is why they remain the most used search engine.

Despite a long time of watching Google with a wary eye, the only honestly bad thing about Google that I can think of is that they retain personally identifying search profile information beyond 30 days (whereas search.aol.com [aol.com] doesn't, and that only came up very recently).

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

One of the other sites reporting on this mentioned:

In BMW's case the doorway page contained the word "gebrauchtwagen" - meaning "used car" in German - over 40 times. The real home page, to which searchers were seamless redirected, only contained the word twice.

Sounds like fraud to me.

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

Amen,

His argument is like saying the latest spam mail that got pasted my filter and my spot subject line check had to be designed that way so that it could get to the user.

It takes the position that the user WANTS to be marketed too, and that ANY method at all to have them be markted to by you is legitimate.

Well, if the user wouldnt want to be markted to you under "honest" conditions, then you shouldnt essentially attempt to get around those conditions.

This is the same with google, google is in the business of providing ME and other users like me with the BEST search results. If that means that under regular best practices you wouldnt even get in the top level, it isnt UP TO YOU AS A COMPANY to "help" the user find you by getting past the methods the user has in place to protect themselves. google is my tool of choice to protect myself from bad search results, and I want it to stay a usefull tool for that.

I dont want to go back to the old days were you could type "cartoon" and get search sites in the first 100 results all saying "cant find entry for cartoon, but you can try to buy cartoon at ebay using our referrer id" bullcrap.

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

I'm talking about sites having to conform to google's whims in order to appear anywhere near the top of a google search. I'm talking about legitimate sites, not even sites selling anything. Sites that simply choose to design their sites in one way or another can have their google rank turned to crap.

The 'whims' of Google's that you're complaining about are just common sense. Google says, make your page clear and informative. If your page is clear and informative, guess what? Google ranks it higher. If your page is clear and informative and has something interesting to say, other people will find it interesting and link to it. If other people link to it, guess what? Google ranks it higher. Google says, don't change your URLs too often. That's common sense, too. If you ceaselessly redesign your site, leaving old URLs dangling as 404 errors, you're hurting people who link to you, and you're hurting people who've bookmarked you. That's common sense, too. All my bookmarks to my bank's site no longer work, because every time they do a redesign they change their URLs, and leave the old ones dangling. Sooner or later, that's going to annoy me enough to make me change banks.

If you do a Google search for 'Simon Brooke [google.co.uk]', you'll find me at the top although my home page is just that, a personal home page, and has no 'optimisation'. Simon Brooke [simonbrooke.com] the Insurance Broker, with an expensive, professionally designed site, comes second. Then there's Simon Brooke [imdb.com] the professional actor on IMDB, then a guy who's into aeroplanes, then Simon Brooke [simonsays.com] the author.

So with all those people with something to sell in the list, how come I and the aeroplane geek make the first page? My site is simple and has been there a long time (more than ten years now, and on the same URL for eight). In that time a lot of people have linked to it, and it doesn't suffer link rot. The plane geek's page gets ranked well because he has good pictures which presumably get linked to.

And that's the lesson for all you soi disant web designers [simonsays.com] out there. Users aren't impressed with your fancy, flash 'splash pages', and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with text as graphics, and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with vacuous marketing puff, and guess what? Google isn't either.

If you've got something interesting and different to say, and you say it clearly, and you say it consistently in the same place, Google will find you. Tricks and cheats aren't needed.

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

In no way is Google telling you how to design your web site. What they are saying is that they have a requirement of what google will index. They want to know that the pages that are indexed by them are what the site will show you. IOW, Google is saying that they want to be fair to their customers (you and me). This is part of their clause (do not be evil). But some sites are run by idiots and will look at how they can cheat the search engines. They want high rankings in some areas, without really having it. That is what porn sites do. They try to have links to themselves for things such as Linux, Microsoft, etc, but the site has NOTHING to do with these. That is cheating, and that is what BWM was doing.
 
Evil? Off hand, I would say that Google is STILL the top

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

Google is saying that they want to be fair to their customers (you and me).

Their customers are advertisers. Their product is you and me.

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

Their customers are advertisers. Their product is you and me.

However, Google's #1 philosophy is:

Focus on the user and all else will follow. As witnessed here: http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html [google.com]

Google's product is searching for the user. Advertisers simply dump money to them because of the prime real estate as a byproduct.

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

Google *IS* telling you how to design your web site. If you do this, and do that, and do this other thing, your ranking will be higher than if you don't do those things. So, two sites, with identical content, but one structurs it in the way that google wants, that one will get a higher page rank.

A computer is unable to actually understand the site content in any meaningfull sense. That would require sentience. The Google spider will simply parse the site, and the search engine will do a word search from the database of parsed sites. The list returned this way needs to be ordered somehow, and structure is one valid way of doing this, since it gives hints of how various words may be related to each other in the page.

In short, your complain is stupid; now matter how Google ordered the results, you could always claim that it is unfair to you.

Now, if I want to design my site in such a way as to be friendly to my users (say, a flash based site... please, no comments about how friendly flash is.. lots of usres like it),

A Flash-based site is not a website. A website is HTML-based. What you have is a Flash file that happens to be reachable through the HTTP protocol, not a website. I don't know if Google can parse Flash at all, but if it does, be thankfull of that and don't complain.

And Flash is not user friendly, and everyone hates it. Don't kid yourself.

but not friendly to google, why should a competitor with a crappier site get a higher rank? Just because they followed googles rules? That's bull.

Well, for starters, your competitor used appropriate technology - HTML - so that his site is accessible to both humans and search engines, while you made a Flash file and pretended that to be a web site (which it is not). If you insist on putting information in a format that cannot be used effectively, don't be surprised that man and machine alike will skip it.

In short, your competitor has a better site than you do, so he gets a better pagerank.

Google != Microsoft, sorry

That's like if Microsoft decided to cut off sales of Windows SDKs to an application software vendor who it decided didn't play by the rules... but of course, they're free to develop desktop applications for other operating systems.

I'm amazed by the hordes of people who like Google-bashing. Nope. Microsoft has constructed a high barrier to entry in their market. You have to overcome application compatibility, user retraining, and lack of Microsoft applications (which means your business documents aren't necessarily compatible).

Google is a search engine. Going to Google is going to a website. If they get even slightly less good than someone else, users can easily go elsewhere -- as evidenced by how quickly Google took over from Yahoo and Altavista.

Google isn't shafting users here. They are working to provide incentive *not* to hire search engine spammers and keep information useful. If the alternative is letting me get shafted by search engine spammers, Google is doing the right thing.

If they provide a clear set of rules, spammers will work up to the very edge of them. If they simply let people know that severe, repeated abuse will result in a penalization in their own database, they reduce spam in their database. I'm all for this move.

Re:Google != Microsoft, sorry

Then when are they going to "delist" Experts exchange, a site that often comes up for technical questions, but does not allow the answer to be seen without a subscription.

When are they going to delist the many, many sites that seem to be created wholely for users looking for an obscure product, however, when you go to the page it is yet another "index" page full of advertisements, often without reference to the product that the user was looking for.

Re:Google != Microsoft, sorry

Then when are they going to "delist" Experts exchange, a site that often comes up for technical questions, but does not allow the answer to be seen without a subscription.

Actually, you can view the responses to atleast some of the questions on Expert Exchange. Just keep scrolling down past the several pages of ads and other crap. I still don't like the site though.

Re:Google != Microsoft, sorry

When are they going to delist the many, many sites that seem to be created wholely for users looking for an obscure product, however, when you go to the page it is yet another "index" page full of advertisements, often without reference to the product that the user was looking for.

Probably as soon as you inform them about it [google.com]. They did so at least shortly after I reported a bunch of spamvertising sites that came up if you searched for "De Sleghte" (common misspelling for a known second hand bookstore chain in Belgium and The Netherlands).

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

>Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank.

You know its "Google rank" as in Google determines the ranking of the page.

>In effect, google is dictating the terms upon which the entire web must operate

Its the users who still determine how the web operates. "We" determined Google is a good search engine and use it. Its quite easy to stop using Google if it starts giving bad information. "I'm looking for BMW in Germany, but Google sucks for that, I'm moving on to another search engine." Before Google there was another most popular search engine (Yahoo? Alta Vista? some Inktomi based site?) and it could easily change again.

I'm all for bashing Google, but its Google's ranking, its their choice.

False Positives blow.

Google isn't the only search engine. If you'd rather use a search engine that turns a blind eye to abuse and constantly have your results filled with false positives, be my guest.

I for one hope all the search engines take aggressive steps to curb and suppress the effectiveness of artificial hacks to improve results. If spamming isn't rewarding for the companies, maybe they'll learn to spend their resources on improving things like page readability, content and functionality instead.

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

It appears the BMW site was also referencing 'used cars' as well as new cars, and redirecting to their own site.

Sounds dodgy to me.

Dodgy? Chrysler was doing this too?

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

How is taking some company that was abusing the system off of a web-site even remotely like arresting people?

The premise is different. The process is different. The consequences are different. The governing factors are different. I'd have a hard time coming up with something that is more unlike police abuse than this situation.

Google is a search engine. Other search engines exist. Using Google does not preclude one from searching on other search engines. Delisting a company from Google may suck for that company, but so what? It isn't like they're putting that company out of business - they're just no longer provind a *free* service to that company because they feel that the company didn't play by their rules.

If Google goes over the line - if they stop listing companies "just because," then people will eventually stop using them because they don't provide useful results. But also, if Google doesn't nuke sites that are breaking the rules, they won't provide useful results, and people will stop using them. It's a balancing act, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Honestly, it seems like everyone's scrambling to find some way to turn Google into the evil empire, another MSFT. Here's the thing - it can't happen because they aren't a monopoly, and they can't become a monopoly because the user investment is exactly zero and the barriers to switching to using another search engine are non-existent. If Google starts dicking people around, Google will see a quick response. With companies like MSFT - where users have to invest a substantial amount of money just to use the products - there's incentive not to switch, since you'd be throwing your "investment" away.

Do I like everything that Google does? Hell no. But I'm able to recognize that their business model is one that would make it very difficult for them to behave in anti-competitive ways withour fucking themselves badly in the process.

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

This brings up some thorny issues in my mind. Google is now dictating the way we must design our sites if we want to even hope to get a decent google rank.

And this differs from any other search engine index since the dawn of time how? Any search engine uses some kind of ranking algorithm. It used to be that stuffing keywords in page titles affected it. That was a bad idea.

Google, like any other search engine has a primary customer to keep happy: me. I use their search engine to find useful data. Google does a much better job at solving *my* problems than any of their competitors. Great. I don't care even a little tiny bit about whether or not BMW is irritated about the fact that they hired some slimy SEO bastards and got smacked for it. Google is continuing to deliver useful content to *me*. If Google does a bad job of that, I'll use another search engine...but you know what? Google is still lightyears ahead of the competition. They *still* have a lighter-weight interface than the competition (which apparently still hasn't figured out that portals are not a replacement for search engines). They still do a good job of getting useful data, despite being the Big Dog that all the search engine spammers are gunning for.

More power to Google -- for making *my* life better.

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

> While this is against the googles terms of service, I can see how someone might think this was a perfectly valid way of countering the fact that google wasn't indexing their site well.

The thing is that the "doorway pages" were stuffed full of german keyword terms like "used cars" and the content was repeated over and over again, with only the model names substituted.

It is garbage. If BMW didn't like the fact that pages didn't work as designed, they should have redesigned them, not presented a totally different set of content to the search engine bots.

Also, you seem to suggest that Google was at fault because it couldn't index the content properly, when, in fact, no search engine could index the site as is as it was designed.

Matt Cutts has a screen cap on his blog -

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-intern ational-webspam/ [mattcutts.com]

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

Yet there's something different between the ordinary spammer/search results manipulator, and bmw.de: the ordinary spammer has little content and zapping it usually improves the browsing experience of google users. Less V14gr4 and stuff. On the other hand, Google becomes less accurate by resetting the pagerank of bmw.de pages. If i search for bmw i would expect to find the official site among the first ones.

IMHO the lesson is: Monopoly isn't good, even if the monopolist isn't evil.

Re:Power for optimum profit

Bonus points for sounding well educated, but I hope you realize that you've basically discovered the principle that companies strive to improve profits. Anything less would be bizarre.

Google has achieved its remarkable success by focusing on customer satisfaction and the end user experience. The whole reason they are so powerful is because the average joe trusts them to do a lot of filtering and ranking so as to provide valuable search results.

That's a very simple point, and I didn't use any fancy "functions of self interest," but a lot of people seem to have a hard time understanding it. This situation is similar to the hypothetical case where Roger Ebert stops reviewing movies from, say, MGM, because they start providing him with different versions of the movies than they actually release. In that case, he'd have every right to say "because I can't accurately review the content which is delivered to my audience, I won't review it at all."

Google is a company (wow!). They want to achieve profits and shareholder value (oh no!). So far, they have accomplished those by offering a customer experience that is superior to their competitors, thereby gaining more eyeballs and ad revenue. This bit of news is exactly in line with what they've always done, albeit more high profile, and seems to indicate that they value the quality of their DB above, say, ad revenue from a gigantic company (should BMW choose to boycott ads).

I found your "discovery" that "over the next few years" Google will have self-interest as a priority, and the implied derision baseless. Can you elaborate on why that's a bad or surprising thing? What, exactly, do they owe you that you think they won't deliver?

Cheers
-b

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

No one makes the argument because BMW is taking advantage of another company, Google, at Google's expense. BMW gains more hits on their web site b/c their PageRank is higher, and Google suffers because word of abuse like this reduces the quality of their searches and the repuration of their search engine. Therefore, to protect their own interests, Google shut down the offender. Both companies were working to maximize the profits of their shareholders, but one was trying to take an action counter to the other's interests, and so the other (Google) responded.

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

The poor people that can't figure out that the BMW web site is www.bmw.com. To be honest if they can't figure that one out, then they can't be bright enough to afford a new BMW (can you guess the ones for Holden and Ford).

For more obscure sites, this is a harsher punishment, for major corporations who base web wite is obvious, it doesn't really make much of a difference (the children at BMW in this case deserved to have their hands smacked, it was after all a pretty silly and pointless thing for them to do).

In many ways a perfect example of Google's publicy declared control system working in practice and just a bit of a warning to smaller companies where this kind of behaviour would have a significant affect. Google preserving the rights of the many for a quality search service against the greed of a few, in my book that fits pretty well with "do no evil".

Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th

...it also illustrates the large and growing power of google, a power that may not always be used for optimal "goodness."

In related news, after being de-listed, the headquarters of BMW Germany ceased to exist. People coming to visit the headquarters found only a vast, dark vortex of nothingness, over which were visible huge glowing letters reading "Error 404: Page Not Found". The entire German management of BMW has disappeared as well, along with several nearby dairy farms and a brewery.

At a press conference, a reporter asked whether this sort of behavior fit with the company's "Do no evil" motto, or reflected a growing arrogance and malice on the part of Google. The Google spokesman declined to respond to the question. Instead his eyes briefly glowed red before the reporter spontaneously burst into flames and was consumed, leaving only a small pile of ashes on the floor.

The remaining reporters had no further questions.

Blog Link

You could at least add a link to the blog entry you mention. Like, say, this one [mattcutts.com].

Sheesh.

The 'blogosphere

I kind of wish they would delist the whole 'blogosphere too, or at least allow us to set an option to not show 'blogs in our searches. I mean, pagerank abuse is rampant on 'blogs (example)( [google.com].

Re:The 'blogosphere

The ultimate goal of google is to show you whatever it is you want to see. When searching for simply the word "failure", that page is what people are expecting to see now and searching for. Why should google artificially alter that?

Because with googlebombing what Google is showing you is what a small number of motivated people want you to see, not what you want to see. The fact that people involved in a googlebomb want to see something does not make it what the majority of people want to see. And making it circular by saying that people now expect to see the results of a succesful googlebomb when they search for failure is just sophistry.

But [google.com.au] really [google.com.au], do [google.com.au] you [google.com.au] expect [google.com.au] to [google.com.au] get [google.com.au] anything [google.com.au] meaningful [google.com.au] out [google.com.au] of [google.com.au] a [google.com.au] search [google.com.au] on [google.com.au] single [google.com.au] semi-random [google.com.au] words [google.com.au] on [google.com.au] Google [google.com.au]?

Re:Oh that's really good

No, they won't be able to find BMW-Germany. BMW in other locations, if I understand correctly, should remain unaffected. Note that BMW International is still indexed and at http://www.bmw.com/ [bmw.com]

Re:Oh that's really good

It's not the keyword, but a specific domain. Only bmw.de was penalized and not, for example, the international portal bmw.com. The .de domain has apparently been grossly "offending" for some time, so this probably was not a snap decision. I'm sure someone thought to call PR.

Correct

Try googling for: "german BMW de"

www.BMW.com comes up as #4 or so... kinda freaky.

Makes you wonder if there will ever bea "common carrier" law for search engines.

-Rick

Re:Oh that's really good

I think that if I were Google, and sufficiently irritated by BMW, I'd just provide a free adword for "BMW" to, say, a BMW competitor saying "Better than BMW".

SEO?

I'm wondering if BMW is actually at fault here, or if they were using a Search Engine Optimization company to try to boost their ranking, or at least employing the same techniques? Redirect pages to give different results based on whether its Google looking at your page or a user is certainly something that needs to be stopped, and drastic measures may be the only possible way to fix this problem (besides acquiring a huge range of IPs or having the Google Toolbar be more intrusive.)

Re:SEO?

I'm wondering if BMW is actually at fault here, or if they were using a Search Engine Optimization company

What's the difference?

Re:SEO?

The difference is whether or not one of their staff did this, or whether they hired a 'professional' firm who assured them that these were accepted practices. Yes, the end result is the same, but with the latter you can give them the benefit of hte doubt that they were misled by their consultants.

-Chris

Which Domestic Car Maker?

I'm kind of interested in which "domestic car maker" he's talking about here:

Finally, as long as we're on the subject of cars: to the domestic car maker whose European domain had hidden text on the front: your 30 day removal was set to expire in two days, but the hidden text has been taken off the page, so I'm scheduling the domain for reinclusion now.

Hang on, I'll Google for it

Oh wait...

Oh...

Oh, is this why Miserable Failure still goes to President Bush? I see they really have a guard on deceptive search methods there at google, but I wonder why their stock is tanking...

Deception

I really like Google, their philosophy, and their ethics.

I really and truly dislike deception. Its very common, especially when money is involved for some reason.

To me, I look at "work" simply. Work is getting paid for doing things for people that they appreciate. The more unique or the more quality or quantity of things that you bring to people, the more money you will get.

Much of advertising is deceptive. 99.999% of SPAM is completely deceptive. And personally, it really irritates me. Don't get me started about the snail mail I get with things like "Check enclosed". Grrrr.

At least here in the US, BMW is a very desired car. Many consider it a status symbol. Their slogan here is "The Ultimate Driving Machine". I don't know what their status is in Germany.

Good for Google, bad for BMW. TFA says that Ricoh might be next for delisting. One thing I wish Google would do is get Froogle out of beta, and separate the search results for buying things and having information about things. Believe it or not, when I do a search for a digital camera or some other product, I may want to learn something about the product before I buy it. And yes, I do use Google for searching for something to buy. I've found $2-3 parts to fix things that I simply could not have found at a local store.

Re:Deception

The more unique or the more quality or quantity of things that you bring to people, the more money you will get.

This is quite simply not true, and even a cursory examination of the products on the shelves of your local grocery or department store will disabuse you of this utopian notion pretty quickly. Price and quality are important, but it is arguable whether they are the most important factors in the success of a product, and quality is largely subjective anyway.

Marketing is the manipulation of perceptions, and that is what really drives sales. Wal-Mart offers neither the best quality nor the lowest prices, for example, but they have successfully convinced a very large number of people that they do, and that's as good as the real thing. There are a lot of market forces at work in the success or failure of a product, and it is often the case that the best products and the hardest-working people fail miserably.

Mind you, I don't think this is the way it should be, but absent some really far-reaching regulation, that's just the way it is in a free market, and it's why there are degrees in things like business and marketing. And yes, virtually all of the other factors amount to unscrupulous behavior to one degree or another. If you'd like that to change, the first step lies in recognizing the market as it actually is.

Re:Google says they don't do this.

The order is still automated. The site has been delisted due to abuse.

If I randomly list four restaurants, they are random. Not choosing to include a fifth on the list doesn't make the list order non-random. It just means that restaurant #5 isn't on the list. Non-inclusion isn't changing order or content; it is defining what is in the database to be searched.

This is about abuse control and removing invalid sites, not reordering valid sites that conform to their pagerank guidelines. They say "Alternately, your page may have been manually removed from our index if it didn't conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank".

Google's Guidelines [google.com]

--
Evan

Ripoffs from Wikipedia

Are they going to do something about the rips from Wikipedia that I often encounter when I run a Google search? There nothing like searching for something (usually fairly obscure), and coming up with (a) a Wikipedia article, and (b) the same Wikipedia article on a dozen other sites with domain names that don't have any fscking thing to do with Wikipedia.

Re:This is ridiculous behavior on Google's part.

What I don't understand is why Google is going out of their way to punish BMW for using SEO strategies to up their pagerank

Because it's a deliberate attempt to deceive the search engine. That's bad for any end user doing a search as it gives them wrong results. Why is that hard to understand?

instead of chasing all the other junk (porn, pharmaceuticals, etc. websites that do the same with far more malicious intent.

I'm not sure what you're saying. Do you want google to eliminate searches for pharmaceuticals and porn? Or do you believe Google isn't stopping people who do inappropriate SEO techniques for drugs and porn?

And on the off chance that Google is trying to 'make an example' by punishing a big company like BMW, someone there needs to be hit with the clue hammer; no disrespectable SEO slinger is going to pay attention to that sort of thing.

Are you kidding? Being delisted by Google is a Big Deal. The rogue SEO companies won't go away right away, but eventually everyone will hear about getting delisted from Google for doing this garbage and the rogue SEO companies will all but disapear. If you seriously think that BMW.de being delisted by google won't make BMW change their deceptive website, I think it's you that needs to be hit with a "clue hammer".

Re:This is ridiculous behavior on Google's part.

In a word, bull.

A company of that size does not NEED to use black hat techniques. Google's algorythms are good enough that a company of that size is almost always the top search (the only time I have not seen that is when there were two large companies with similar names). Using these techniques make it easier, but they are not needed.

Also note, it does set an example. They are not going after *just* bmw.de.

In other news...

...BMW drivers all over Palo Alto are somehow locked out of their cars, coincidentally affecting some Google employees. No word yet on if this affects all cars globally, or if this is a localized problem.

Why? SE Cloaking / Stealth is slimy

So, Google delisted bmw.de for doing something that "Search Engine Optimizers" call SE cloaking or SE stealth. This is where you show the search engine crawler one keyword-loaded thing, but then show the normal user another thing; usually this is done by looking at the HTTP_User_Agent server-side, but in this case bmw.de was doing it with client-side javascript redirects.

IMO, they and many others deserve to be delisted for attempting to game the system. The only SE tactic more disgusting is spamming blogs for free pagerank boosts.

The best legit means to increase your rank is simply to have quality content that people WANT to link to, and which is intelligently marked up (e.g. use header tags for important stuff; not sliced up images that semantically mean nothing).

PageRank & Delisting are DIFFERENT.

There's a few comments which talk about Google stripping the PR like that's the punishment.

The punishment is not the stripping of PR, but being delisted. There are no bmw.de pages in Google. The URL is not in Google.

PR is calculated by an algorithm. It has been reset to 0, but that is because the site has been DE-LISTED. It is 0 now, because the URL is not in Google.

When the site qualifies for reinclusion the site's PR will return to it's normal value. It is calculated by an algorithm on a computer, not a pen, paper and opinion.

Now, the relevance of PageRank.

PageRank is one of many deciding factors used to sort search results by relevancy. It is far from the only one, and if you use something like http://www.seochat.com/?tool=7&option=com_seotools [seochat.com] you will see pretty quickly that the PR between results can vary greatly. You are quite likely to see lower-PR pages (or no PR pages) returned in the top 20 results, ahead of higher ones.

For instance, porn:
5 - 5 - 5 - 6 - 5 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 7 - 5 - 5 - 5 - 0 - 0 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 5 - 5 - 0

If PR was truly a critical factor, there would not be 3 pages with PR0 in the first 20 results, and PR5's would not dominate the results.

I'm disappointed that after 10 years Google can't write a spider that DOESN'T identify itself as GoogleBot and confirms that pages match what the spider sees. How hard could it possibly be to setup a few more spiders' whose sole job is to follow the real Googlebots and misidentify their UA to confirm what's been indexed?

Google isn't a public service...

Google is a company. As a website owner they will help people find your site for free so you can do business IF you follow there terms. As a web user they help you find the sites that are making use of their free indexing service and following the rules. Search engines are by no means required to list ANY page, and while I certainly wouldn't agree with a search engine that delists on more sheisty terms (for example, delisting Microsoft.com because they are linux users) it is still their right to do that. It's not like BMW is losing a service they paid for, they are losing a free service they abused. So now, BMW of Germany is forced to clean up their act, or move on to traditional marketing to get people to their site, boo freakin hoo. Access to a search engine isn't a right for anyone, its a privlidge.

google and SEO

the first result for searhing for SEO on google is this
google webmaster info [google.com]
the page has some usefull info for webmasters (obviously BMW didn read it before attemptign black hat seo techniques)
i found the first paragraph amusing




# Be wary of SEO firms that send you email out of the blue. Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

"Dear google.com, I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

Re:Politics

So now searche engine listing has become Politics. No longer is it abouat organizing information, it's whether or not they want you listed. So if Google doesn't like you (alternate situtaion, not this one) they can remove you from what normal people think of as "on the internet"? Seems unfair to me, maybe they could have lowered it's rating, but remove it?

Politics? No, Google is taking reasonable action protecting the value of their search engine, by disallowing page-rank abuse. The reason this is news is that BMW is a giant company, getting called on the kind of shit you expect from two-bit porn sites and the like. No one complains when they delist Tommy's Tits And Underage Bits for doing things like this, because it's reasonable behavior. It is, however, an occasion to look at the growing power of Google (and remember, perhaps, that such a large amount of power in the hands of one company can be dangerous, regardless of intent).

Re:Politics

It is, however, an occasion to look at the growing power of Google (and remember, perhaps, that such a large amount of power in the hands of one company can be dangerous, regardless of intent).

I don't think we have too much to worry about. The power Google has in this is because it is the most popular search engine. As soon as they start abusing the power and delisting major sites, then there will certainly be another search engine that will take its place. So it is in its best interest to behave well.

The bottom line is that Google wants to be the best search engine it can be. It doesn't do that by not indexing mass amounts of companies. It also doesn't do it by alowing webmasters to get themselves at the top of the results just because of some tricks. So it must walk a fine line. In fact its best bet is to delist one or two high profile companies and make a big deal about it, so that it discourages other companies from following them.

Re:Politics

maybe they could have lowered it's rating, but remove it?

They did simply lower it. They reset its page rank to zero, so it shows up at the bottom of any results, or amongst all the other zero page rank results.

But as far as search engines go, a listing at the end is just the same as not being listed at all. In any case they did just as you said, they lowered its ranking. The summary I guess is technically incorrect, but practically acurate.

Re:Politics

I'd hardly say it was political, or with political motivations. Google have guidelines and bmw.de did not follow them. For Google to alter the page rank to anything other than zero would be less ethical than resetting it to zero. (afterall no one is to know how much of their rank was attributed to the keyword mashing) Note this isn't an actual blacklist, but rather having the page-rank which was acquired by inappropriate means, reset to zero allows it to in time regain a significant position, but only for relevant websearches

Resetting the page-rank to zero is fair and non-permanent. Simply put bmw.de will regain a legitimate page-rank in the future, but for now this is the short term consequence of using keyword treatment to your website. (Note the bmw.de website would display paragraphs of motoring related keywords when javascript was turned off, this tactic overtime artificially boosts your page rank. It is easy to reproduce, however it is not an invisible action and is against most search sites terms.)

Re:Politics

No longer is it about organizing information, it's whether or not they want you listed.

Their track record says otherwise. In 2004, they came under fire for not removing an anti-semitic website [sethf.com], jewwatch.com, which was coming up as the first hit when searching for "jew". Even today, it is second only to Wikipedia.

Their argument at the time was that they were not going to block sites from their index based on content. According to that site that I linked, it was blocked in countries where the content of the site was illegal.

It looks to me like they will not block based on (legal) content, but will block people who fsck with PageRanks.

Re:And where does this stop?

Do you really trust real people to be "grading" content?

...epecially if they are KNOWN employees of Google (they'd be kinda easy to pay off, no?).

Re:well, they DID break the law!

Google 's job is to search and report what it finds, not to act as the earth's police!

Google's job is to get me useful information.

This makes Google's interests and my interests very well aligned.

The job of SEOers is to prevent me from getting useful information. Google just sent a severe smack out towards people using SEOers. I'm cheering all the way.

Tell you what. You don't like it, you can go set up a search engine that *advocates* abuse by SEOers, and try and get people to use that. Have fun.

Re:Is this restraint of trade?

Google purports to find information on the web. They aren't a directory where you have to pay to be listed. It doesn't matter that they offer their service for free. If they post misleading information or omit information that people should expect to be there, they could be in trouble.

You said it yourself: google isn't a directory service. Nobody pays to be included. Google can exclude a site for a number of reasons, which are all easily accessible on their site. Is says specifically that websites which do not adhere to the rules may be removed from the index.

When you search for something innoculous and get porn back, or one of those useless link farms, it is because of techniques like this. Maybe BMW was using them for good purposes, maybe not. Tough luck. They did something wrong, their pagerank was set to zero, as it should be. It's what I'd want to see happen to the porn and the link farms, it's what I'd want to see happen to anyone else who tried the same low, deceptive tricks.

Re:.de ?

Wouldn't people (apart from Germans, or those that speak German) go to bmw.com anyway?

You do realise BMW is a German company and selling a quarter of their cars at home, don't you?
www.bmw.com is a portal, with links to invertor relations and so on. You can get to the country sites from there, and the international site happens to be available in German, but generally, using your local country domain directly will take you to a consumer site, in your langue, with localised pricing. Consumers usually expect a big company to have a local version of their site.
Anyway, this is about search results, not the location bar. Linked sites on bmw.de will simply not show up.

Re:Fraud? Seriously...

"Certified pre-owned" is not merely a euphemism for "used". In order to sell a car with that moniker the manufacturer requires the dealer to check the car against an extensive checklist of possible defects and problems and to correct them if necessary. As a result, the dealer can offer the car with a manufacturer-backed warranty.

New car dealers generally sell used cars of various makes but can only offer "certified pre-owned" cars of the make the dealer sells new. So a Ford dealer may sell used Chevrolets, Saabs and Toyotas but the only "certified pre-owned" used cars it will sell will be Fords.