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.
When a search engine visited a page like www.bmw.de/bmw-neuwagen.html, it would see a page like this:
However, a user’s browser would immediately trigger a JavaScript redirect to a completely different url which looked like this:
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.”
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.
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.
Google logo
BMW logo
The search engine Google announced the removal of the official German BMW web site from its search results today. Google is reported to have removed the website due to the use of a trick to raise its website ratings in the search engine's results.

The online version of Forbes magazine reported that the German word for used car, ''Gebrauchtwagen'', appeared 42 times in a doorway web page created by the German car manufacturer. Doorway web pages contain many keywords designed to attract search robots. The page presented to Google's robot for indexing was significantly different from the page presented to the site's visitors.

According to a recent blog post by Matt Cutts, one of Google's software engineers, this technique is "a violation of our webmaster quality guidelines."  These guidelines encourage webmasters to "avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings."

BMW reacted to the measure by claiming that it had no intention of manipulating the search results, but instead used the doorway pages with the objective of "offering a better service" to those looking for used cars.