This is the news of the week: BMW's German website has been banned from Google.de for spamming search engines.
It has been the blog of Matt Cutts who revealed this ban. Matt is a Google employee who writes one of the best SEO content blogs on the web. Obviously, Matt doesn't reveal anything that Google doesn't want, but at least the information he provides is always first-hand and comes straight from the source.
Let's see what happened...
A few weeks ago Matt mentioned that Google is going to get much tougher against search engine spam and that between February and March it will change the way it indexes sites to combat it. It won't change the algorithm, but its spiders will look for spam and report it for later elimination.
The problem of spam is becoming a nightmare for the main search engines and the case of BMW is not an isolated one. Many webmasters believe they can fool Google and other search engines by using hidden code or camouflaging words in their texts.
Many times, when browsing Google results, you come across pages that are not correctly positioned… but not because they are good… but the opposite. You wonder how such a “crappy” page with such poor content can be in the first position for a search with more than five hundred thousand results. If you look closely at the code, you end up finding the reason. BMW's case is also with hidden code, now we can no longer see it except in the image that Cutt shows us, but there are still many pages that practice spam and that Google has not detected and expelled.
Let's look at an example where you can still see the hidden code:
If we Google “home alarms”, we will find 996,000 results. This page is in first place. If you go to it, you will see that there is no apparent reason for it to be in this position. But if you edit its source code, you will discover why it is in first position: a hidden text in a “no script” with more than 3,000 words.
Note: you won't be able to see the code if you right-click on it and choose to view code... (they've already made sure you can't do that), but you will see the code if you go to the top menu bar and click on: see >> Source code.
We'll see how long they last...
By looking at whether or not they disappear from Google, we can also know when Google has activated the antispam indexing system.
…and about BMW: BMW has already apologized to Google and Google has already put them back on the list of sites to be indexed, so in the next update their pages will be indexed again. But it takes time (like months) to re-index a whole website, with all its pages. (Unless you use Google's “site map” to do it, which I don't know if BMW will do… we'll see).
The moral of all this is: Don't try to trick Google and focus on building your pages well and having interesting content that will get other websites to recommend you (this will increase your PageRank). Make a Digital Marketing Plan and follow it.
Moral 2 would be: Search engines really do have a decisive influence on the success or failure of websites… otherwise, BMW would not risk being banned for such an issue, nor would many other websites.
Additional information:
Article where we explained what search engine spam is and Google's possible solution against it by including the Trust Rank algorithm to qualify Page Rank:
Discover what Google's PageRank replacement will look like: TRUST RANK
Article where we explained what Google's “site map” service is and how it works: Discover the indexing of the future: Google SiteMap
Text camouflaged by BMW:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/
Free SEO course that won't get you banned: Online Course on Search Engine Optimization
