War of Words: Google vs. BMW
One of
the most interesting developments of the past month was a widely-publicized, and
very public, battle between search-engine giant Google and the German
luxury-carmaker BMW. Both sides fired verbal salvos for more than a week about
the brief removal of BMW’s German-language homepage from Google’s database.
The recently-redesigned BMW.de, had been removed from Google in early February
for allegedly misleading SEO practices. Matt Cutts, software engineer at Google,
wrote in his blog on February 4th that BWM.de had been removed from the search
engine for violating Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. The offending pages
were gateway pages, filled with relevant keywords, which immediately triggered a
JavaScript redirect to forward the visitor to the BMW.de homepage. This
practice, according to Cutts, violated the principle of “Don’t deceive your
users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”
The ban on BMW.de was short lived, however. The site was back in Google by
February 7th. BMW had apparently removed the gateway pages, but defends its
practices. Markus Sagemann, spokesman for BMW, asserts that the content on the
gateway pages were not misleading but were “designed to give a search engine an
idea of what’s on the pages behind it.” Sagemann also criticizes the failure of
Google to notify BMW of the alleged offense before removing the website and
announcing it to the public. “I think one should have the chance to react before
this is spread publicly because the damage residing from this in terms of public
opinion is something one could question, ” says Sagemann.
This incident raises some interesting issues. First, it is surprising to see the
adoption of semi-official corporate blogs as a primary communication source
between two of the largest companies on the planet. We obviously do not know the
whole story here, but that doesn’t change the fact that a blog posting was cited
as authority by respected journalists around the globe. Second, this is the most
public execution of the Google “death penalty” yet. Is Google getting more
serious about cracking down on webspam, or is it just getting more public in its
anti-spam efforts?