BMW Blasts Google for Ban

A very public war of words has erupted between search-engine giant Google and German luxury-carmaker BMW.  Many sites over the past several months have been given the Google “death penalty”, a PageRank of 0, but few have attracted as much attention as the removal of BMW’s website.

The recently-redesigned German-language BWM website, BMW.de, had been removed from Google last week for allegedly misleading SEO practices.  Matt Cutts, software engineer at Google, wrote in his blog on Saturday the 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 Tuesday, February 7^th.  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.