Beware the Google Death Penalty --Why Did This Happen? (2)

[sunshine]

It’s surprising that this should happen to such a high-profile website, to be sure. But then, it’s also surprising that such a website should be engaging in black hat SEO tactics in the first place. Think about it. Why is a prestigious car manufacturer’s website engaging in the same practices that are more often associated with the websites of gambling emporiums and porn purveyors?

As previously mentioned, Google apparently hadn’t paid as close attention to webspam associated with sites from other countries or in languages other than English. If we consider it on that level, maybe BMW figured it could get away with it for its German site. Other observers have pointed out that the temporary ban was more symbolic in nature than anything, because BMW has a global site and sites geared to other countries, so it could bear the disappearance of one of its national sites. Even if Google’s ban was merely symbolic, it served the purpose of putting other companies less able to handle a Google Death Penalty on warning.

Another reason this happened is Google’s growing popularity, and the growing popularity of searching as an online activity in general. According to a February 2006 report from Nielsen/NetRatings, the total number of searches conducted in the U.S. across 60 search engines grew year-over-year by 55 percent, to nearly 5.1 billion searches in December 2005. Google’s share of that market grew more than five percent, while both Yahoo’s and MSN’s shares declined.

It is particularly interesting that the number of searches conducted online increased so much, yet the number of people connecting to the Internet in the U.S. increased by only three percent. As if we didn’t already know, that makes search a very popular activity – and therefore it’s correspondingly more important to score high in the SERPs. People sometimes take desperate measures that are not well thought out when there is so much on the line.

There are other reasons why this could have happened. BMW Germany may have hired a company that engages in black hat SEO without checking them out carefully (I’ll discuss some of Google’s recommendations when choosing an SEO in the next section). There’s another possibility, though it seems less likely in this case: whoever built those JavaScript redirects might have sincerely not known that their actions could lead to the site being delisted. Cutts’ post about filing a reinclusion request garnered more than 200 replies, many from web masters who sounded sincerely confused as to why their websites were delisted. Apparently, despite the guidelines, it is not always obvious what was done to bring on Google’s ire – and Google has not always been particularly forthcoming with the information.