Check it out: BMW's German site has been banned by Google. Evidently, they've been using black hat SEO tactics (doorway pages, specifically) to boost their rankings.
According to the BBC -
A BMW spokesman admitted the company used the doorway pages, a practice known as search engine optimisation and banned by Google.
But the spokesman insisted the company's intentions were honourable.
"We did not provide different content in the search results to the final website," Markus Sagemann told the BBC News website.
"However, if Google says all doorway pages are illegal we have to take this into consideration."
Bummer for BMW. But this is the reason you should trust SEO to the pros. It's a tricky business, and generally, if results seem too good to be true....well, they probably are. BMW was looking for ways around its Java-heavy, search-*un*friendly site. They found it - but at a cost. Now BMW.de has a page rank of zero, doomed to bottom-level listings until their ban is lifted.
If BMW had trusted its SEO to a reliable professional - preferably a SEMPO member (like DigitalGrit**) they certainly could have avoided the embarassment and lost opportunities this fiasco has caused. As our SEO Director, Cezanne Huq points out, while cloaking, keyword stuffing or doorway pages may seem like a reasonable and simple solution to Flash-heavy or other SEO-challenged sites, "arriving at the the solution may have been innocent but Google and Yahoo will not care and a client's site will be delisted for more than 30 days regardless of who they are." That's a high price to pay for a little faux-pas.
Sticking with best practices will always be your best bet.
Read about the BMW debacle here (BBC) or here (Pocket-Lint.co.uk).
**Couldn't pass up the opportunity for this gratuitous plug!
Where, oh where, is Cezanne Huq? Please e-mail me, I'm a real human being, not a crazy spambot. It's about the v'urth site from a few years back...
Posted by: MC | February 12, 2006 at 01:43 AM