BMW slap down
- Date: 7th February 2006
- Source: Usenet - alt.www.webmaster
- Thread: BMW slap down
Original Article
Greetings One & All
A new term on me, but possibly familiar to those that are sunk in the mire of SEO: webspam
- brought to my attention because we now also have 'international webspam'.
The mighty goog says: <q>Don't [...] present different content to search engines than you display to users</q> and it's their company so they can make the rules.
Auntie (BBC) says: <q>Google has now reduced BMW's page rank to zero, ensuring the company no longer appears at the top</q>
I'd never really taken on board that any search index might employ manual tweaks - assuming that all feedback, when acted on, resulted in tweaks to index algos. Where do they find the time/resources?
Oh well, live and learn.
- Matt Cutts - ramping up on international webspam
- google - webmasters guide
- BBC - BMW given Google 'death penalty'
footnote: talking of webspam ... on the BBC page there is a section: related links. The only link is clearly labeled "[...]bmw.de" and links to: "[...]google.com"[*] - oddly there is no link (that I could see) to the blog where the story broke, nor links to any of the google guidline pages.
[*] update: now corrected.
summary of replies
Rastus
Perhaps they were of the opinion the hundred or so *other* black hat SE optomised Google Adsense farms that would have otherwise beat BMW to the number one spot for the term "BMW" deserved the spot more?
Talk about "damned if you do and damned if you don't".
If their algorythym was healthy - and they could counter webspam effectively - then BMW would be top spot anyway. Why target BMW alone instead of the hundreds of other sites below them that forced them down that path in the first place.
Not being able to get BMW in your searches for BMW does Google no favours either. Just goes to highlight they are perfectly happy to be completely irrellevent. Let's face it - Google rankings aren't "holy" - they were more than happy to whore themselves out to the Chinese.
hug
Observe google carefully and watch what happens as the employees who worked together to build a search engine turn their stock options into cash and retire, leaving behind newcomers who are guided by a greedy marketing machine and their own desire for stock option cash. What goes around comes around, google replaced its initial competition by providing more useful search results; there is now once again a vacuum in the useful-search-engine category since google has become little more than an advertising eyesore.
T.J.
Be interesting to see if BMW start sending out Cease and Desist Letters to all the sites blatantly using BMW as keywords.
CJM
I think this might be one of those well-publicised examples designed to teach us all a lesson. They can tweak manually and they're not afraid to use it...
But as you say, it is unlikely that they have the time & resources to do much tweaking....
Eric Jarvis
It's been common practise as long as I can remember. It seems to involve Google staff manually investigating complaints and directly blacklisting sites that they consider to be unfairly promoted in ways the algorithm doesn't detect. It's not often a large company is dumb enough to fall foul of it.
It doesn't happen often, it doesn't happen fast, and it doesn't happen unless you do something clearly designed to fool the search engine about the content of the site.
BG
Was somebody at Google dissatisfied with the service they got on their Beamer?