Google bans BMW for keyword stuffing

BMW's Denmark website used artificial means to gain search engine ranking and traffic, says Google.

BY A CORRESPONDENT
February 8, 2006

Google and BMW are caught in a battle over search engine optimisation. Recently, Google banned BMW's german site from its index since the auto giant - according to Google - resorted to keyword stuffing in its pages.

Keyword stuffing of webpages is regularly misused by search engine optimisers (SEOs) to gain ranking in search engine indices. However, new search engine technologies are clever enough to spot and reject most of the SEO tactics.

Regarding the Google-BMW face-off, a spokesman said: "We cannot tolerate Web sites trying to manipulate search results as we aim to provide users with relevant and objective search results. Google may temporarily or permanently ban any site or site authors that engage in tactics designed to distort their rankings."

Google penalises websites for resorting to underhand tactics to boost rankings. Now, BMW is the latest high-profile company to ae Google ire. Most of the time, Google bans and penalties are subtle, and few ever hear of it. But BMW is too big to ignore.

Matt Cutts, beleived to be a Google employee, said in his blog that the BMW website used the word "gebrauchtwagen" (meaning used cars) and "BMW" numerous times in its website to artifically gain search engine ranking.

The impact of a Google penalty is that keyword searches related to the company in question never show the company. This results in loss of web traffic, and consequently, loss of popularity on the Internet.

Google also has a policy of reintroducing banned sites into its index, once it is sure that the site has abandoned the questonable practices.

Though the Google penalty is on BMW, it is not clear whether BMW deliberately used underhand tactics to gain web traffic, or did it out of error.

According to Google, "BMW.de had been removed last week because certain pages on the site would show up one way when the search engine visited the page but when a Web user opened the page, a redirect mechanism would display a completely different page.”

The Google war cary on BMW has raised a storm of debate on search engine watchers. BMW has not made any official comment on the issue. Neither has Google. Many observers feel that by practising mind-control, Google is attempt to push its version of good and bad on the Internet company in a monopolistic move. They add that Google's recentr refusal to hand over search data to the US justice department is another indication of the search engine giant's intention to dominate the Net.

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