Google blacklists BMW
p2p news / p2pnet: Google has issued the ‘Google Death Penalty’ to German car maker BMW.
"Matt Cutts, a blogger claiming to be a Google software engineer, wrote that the company appeared to have used underhand practices to ensure that searches for BMW and ‘gebrauchtwagen’ – used cars – would return the carmaker’s website first," says the Times Online.
And Ricoh Germany is to get the same treatment, says Cutts’ blog.
"The practice – known as search engine optimisation – is frequently used by webmasters,” says the Times. “But engineers at Google are said to have taken exception to the methods apparently being used by BMW in Germany."
States Cutts on his blog, "Remember my previous post noting that Google would be paying more attention to webspam in other countries and languages this year? This week our webspam team continued ramping up our anti-spam efforts by removing bmw.de from our index, and ricoh.de will be removed soon for similar reasons."
Cutts wrote Google’s Safe search filtering feature, says VNUNet, quoting his blog as saying BMW.de created ‘doorway’ pages containing a list of keywords designed to boost its position in the rankings, but which then redirects users to a different site, in this case BMW’s German sales site."
"That’s 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’," says Cutts’ post.
"It appears that at least some of the JavaScript-redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google’s webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We’ll probably also need some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded. I’m leaving comments turned off on this post; there are no doubt plenty of other search engine optimization areas to discuss this."
Google recently pulled p2pnet’s Adsense panels (right) and the paid search function, wrongly claiming p2pnet had generated false clicks.
"Google has publicly accused p2pnet and, hence, me, of ‘violating’ their terms, in other words, of being dishonest," says p2pnet editor Jon Newton in a response to a reader’s comment. "And they’ve made this charge with only a vague description of what I’m supposed to have done because the ‘monitoring system’ through which Team Google arrived at its erroneous conclusion is ‘proprietary’.
"This is exactly like someone being found guilty of some offence which can’t be described in detail because the procedure which defines it is secret. Isn’t that something which happens in closed rather than open societies?"
p2pnet will shortly be trying new text ads in the former Adsense space and we’ll let you know how they compare.
Also See:
Times Online – Yahoo, AOL plan e-mail filter-buster, February 6, 2006
blog – Ramping up on international webspam, February 4, 2006
VNUNet – Google blacklists page rank cheats, February 6, 2006
Adsense panels – Google yanks p2pnet ads: II, February 4, 2006
