Google Bans BMW website

BMW falls foul of Google 'web spam' rules

This is kind "inside baseball" website stuff, but it has deep implications for how you'll find information on the internet into the future.

BMW, like many companies, employed what are called "doorway pages" on their website: pages which search engines can find which cause those websites to appear high in search results when users type in certain search phrases. Visitors who click on the link found by the search engines are redirected to an entirely different page. If you've ever used a search engine and found yourself looking a page which doesn't have anything to do with the link that you thought you were clicking on, this is probably what happened to you.

Needless to say, this sort of thing makes search engine owners very unhappy. Engaging in so called "black hat" (because bad guys wear black hats) techniques is grounds for being removed completely from the search engine, and Google has been aggressively going after this and other kinds of trickery that webmasters use to get their sites listed more highly in search results than they otherwise should.

Google has been warning webmasters for a long time not to engage in these practices, but evidently BMW thought being a major corporation granted them immunity from the rules everyone else is expected to play by. Google didn't care about BMW's status, and on Saturday they removed BMW's German language site for engaging in these shady practices.

So what does this mean to you? What it means is that hopefully Google, and other search engines, are getting better and weeding out such trickery - no matter who's engaging in it. It also may mean that you might not be able to find some familiar brand name websites in search results if their parent companies don't heed search engine warnings.