The search engine's Webspam team is less than impressed with BMW's German Web site

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.


Full article: ZDNet UK