Lee Odden

BMW Site Gets Spanked by Google

Lee Odden     Google, Marketing Industry News, SEO

Notice to search marketers: Your brand will not save you from the consequences of screwing with search engines. Lots of fun commentary on this one:

Google blacklists BMW.de – CNET News.com

Ramping up on international webspam – Matt Cutts of Google

BMW cheats search-engines, Google removes it from search results – Boing Boing

For Matt Cutts to point out a crackdown on international search spam, I suspect there has been a lot of it going on un-checked. Or at least not under as much scruitiny as English language sites.

Time for BMW.de to clean up their act and brush up on steps to a re-inclusion request.

I wonder how BMW Public Relations is going to handle this? Do you think they’ll “out” the SEO?

Tags: BMW, Google, Blacklisted, Banned

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Lee Odden About Lee Odden

@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of Online Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on integrated content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely on a beach somewhere doing absolutely nothing.

Comments

  1. Tom says:
    February 6, 2006 at 5:14 pm

    Hi,
    Not only bmw.de cheats search-engines. Doorway pages it is slowly becoming German speciality 🙂
    Disable JS –>

  2. Lee Odden says:
    February 6, 2006 at 6:29 pm

    The funny thing is, what BMW was doing, was just blatant, outright search spam.

  3. Max says:
    February 6, 2006 at 7:46 pm

    Are there any news yet on unknown German webmaster found at BMW junkyard – strangled to death with a PC power cord?

  4. Daniel says:
    February 6, 2006 at 6:09 pm

    This really smacks of Google flexing their muscles – but good on them for doing it, it sends a very clear message about how not to get ranking in a search engine.

  5. Tom says:
    February 6, 2006 at 8:17 pm

    Hi again,
    bmw.fr – this same “problem” 😉

  6. Lee Odden says:
    February 7, 2006 at 12:52 pm

    I suppose it’s the hundreds or more permutations of things relevant to “BMW” that they were going after.

    Chris, was your comment above the launch of your blog? Damn, get some posts up there will ya?

  7. Chris Porter says:
    February 7, 2006 at 11:08 am

    You gotta chuckle when this kinda thing happens, but just like other Multinationals they’ll get re-included in no time once they clean up their act. The funny thing is; why wasnt BMW ranking first anyway? As Dave Naylor was saying, BMW.de reponse might be : “well if you had a decent search algorithm you’d realise WE ARE THE MOST RELEVANT TO BMW and we wouldnt need to spam you!” (totally paraphrased hence not really a quote).