SEO Tricks can cost you a lot
All I can say about this is - wow. The German language BMW site has been kicked out of the Google index due to SEO hacks that Google doesn't like - specifically, the use of "doorway pages":
From what it looks like, the German websites of car maker BMW have been kicked out of the Google index. BMW.de at this time has a PageRank of 0. A search for BMW Germany, which only days ago yielded BMW.de as a top result, now doesn’t show any sign of BMW.de at all. Instead, BMW.com BMW’s international site is on top for this search.
There are a lot of marketing departments that will want to pay attention to this.
Comments
Google is learning its power
[Lex Spoon] February 6, 2006 3:03:13.827
Yikes! This makes me really rethink the common approach of using Google as the real universal resource locator. I find it easier to say "google for lex spoon chuck" than to post an actual URL. However, it's disturbing if Google is going to cut people off their engine like this one day.
There's a philosophy that the capabilities crowd is excited about, and that the "peer-to-peer" fans are close to grasping: it's a good idea not to have centers of power on the Internet. Too much is at stake if one of the power centers does something wrong. And even when things are fine, there tend to be big fights around control of these things. Think DNS, or the IP number space, or the TLS certification hierarchy. Now I add search to that list. While Google's action here doesn't matter to me personally, it just doesn't seem like the right way to provide a web-searching service.
Does anyone know of a plausible web-searching approach that does *not* involve a centralized trusted web site?