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A very public war of words has erupted between search-engine
giant Google and German luxury-carmaker BMW. Many sites over
the past several months have been given the Google “death
penalty”, a PageRank of 0, but few have attracted as
much attention as the removal of BMW’s website.
The
recently-redesigned German-language BWM website, BMW.de, had
been removed from Google last week for allegedly misleading
SEO practices. Matt Cutts, software engineer at Google, wrote
in his blog on Saturday the BWM.de had been removed from the
search engine for violating Google’s webmaster quality
guidelines. The offending pages were gateway pages, filled
with relevant keywords, which immediately triggered a JavaScript
redirect to forward the visitor to the BMW.de homepage. This
practice, according to Cutts, violated the principle of “Don’t
deceive your users or present different content to search
engines than you display to users.”
The
ban on BMW.de was short lived, however. The site was back
in Google by Tuesday, February 7th. BMW had apparently removed
the gateway pages, but defends its practices. Markus Sagemann,
spokesman for BMW, asserts that the content on the gateway
pages were not misleading but were “designed to give
a search engine an idea of what’s on the pages behind
it.” Sagemann also criticizes the failure of Google to
notify BMW of the alleged offense before removing the website
and announcing it to the public. “I think one should
have the chance to react before this is spread publicly because
the damage residing from this in terms of public opinion is
something one could question,” says Sagemann.
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