Google Bans BMW For Black-Hat SEO Tricks
SEO Black-Hat techniques are in the news with the BBC reporting that Google has “blacklisted” the website of German car manufacturer BMW for breaching its guidelines.
Investigations by Google found that BMW’s German website influenced search results to ensure top ranking when users searched for “used car.” Google website guidelines request that webmasters “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.
“BMW admitted using so-called “doorway pages” to boost search rankings, but denied any attempt to mislead users. Google has now reduced BMW’s page rank to zero, and confirmed that BMW.de had been removed from search results, adding that it would not tolerate any attempts to manipulate searches.
Will the reportage by BBC brand SEO’s universally as bad guy Black Hat SEO’s and ignore the good guy White Hats? Well, bad news always make the headlines, so its not surprising that the news about a company like BMW losing its search engine rankings is big news.
As Matt Cutts reports on his blog, Google is ramping up on international webspam and when a large corporation like BMW happens to get caught in its nets, it makes the case for ethical SEO practices stronger than ever.
February 13th, 2006 at 10:18 am
Hello:
SEO is increasingly becoming more like a rocket science instead of a set of guidelines to create a website that can be indexed and ranked by the search engines.
And the fact that these search engines are constantly changing their algorithms and guidelines doesn’t help in any way.
You may follow all the guidelines and do all of them correctly and yet be unable to get a good ranking or if you get it to maintain it.
The fact is that it is an impossible task for millions of websites to maintain top 10 ranking at the same time.
One strategy that these search engines ought to implement is to rotate top 10 ranking every week.
This will evenly distribute the rankings and make them democratic and benefit more websites.
Right now only the best and the brightest with deep pockets can have any chance to ranking among top 10.
What about the rest of the tens of millions of websites?
How are they going to get traffic and survive?
This current model is undemocratic, autocratic and hostile to e-commerce.
It only helps big businesses that have millions of dollars to squander paying SEO companies to do everything necessary to keep them in top 10 positions.
The smaller companies and mom and dad websites have no hope and are left out to perish.
The internet is supposed to level the playing field, instead the search engines have made it autocratic, unprofitable and hostile to 90% of the businesses.
Ikey Benney
http://www.maychic.com/maysearch