Beware the Google Death Penalty (2)

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What BMW’s German site did was a clear violation of Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. The provision Cutts cited in particular was “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.” You can think of this guideline as an extension of Google’s well-known “Don’t be evil” corporate culture.

What punishment did Google inflict on the German BMW website? First of all, it removed the site from its index. This meant that users searching for terms such as “BMW” or “BMW Germany” would not be linked to the German BMW site directly. Instead, the results would show BMW’s global site. For BMW, that may not seem like a harsh punishment – but it’s easy to see how a smaller company that does not have the variety of websites maintained by a multinational firm could be hurt by such a move.

In addition to being removed from Google’s index, the German BMW site’s PageRank was reset to zero. PageRank is the algorithm Google uses to assign every page on the Internet a popularity ranking of sorts. If your page has been removed from the index already, the PageRank reset is almost like adding insult to injury. For pages that have not been removed from the index, it means they show up at the end of search results and therefore can hardly be found.

So what did Google require BMW to do to atone for its crime? First it had to get rid of all those JavaScript redirects. Then it had to file a reinclusion request with the search engine. Google provides a web form to help automate the process; Matt Cutts explains what the company is looking for in a September 2005 blog entry.

What did BMW need to include? According to Cutts, when it comes to reinclusion requests, “Fundamentally, Google wants to know two things: 1) that any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and 2) that it’s not going to happen again. I’d recommend giving a short explanation of what happened from your perspective: what actions may have led to any penalties and any corrective action that you’ve taken to prevent any spam in the future. If you employed an SEO company, it indicates good faith if you tell us specifics about the SEO firm and what they did–it assists us in evaluating reinclusion requests.” In BMW’s specific case, Cutts suggested that BMW include details on who created the doorway pages, and “some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded.”