Even the big guys get things wrong with dire consequences for their business. Recently BMW's German site was removed from Google for breaching its guidelines. BMW admitted using "doorway pages" to boost its search rankings.
BMW used text-heavy pages liberally sprinkled with keywords to attract the attention of Google's indexing system. However, once a user clicked on the link displayed in Google's results window, they were redirected to a regular BMW Germany page, which contained far fewer of the keywords.
The penalty for breaching Google's guidelines is a ban from all Google's listings for that site(s).
Google's quality guidelines require websites to be designed for users, not for search engines. "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as 'cloaking'," Google says.
Google confirmed that BMW.de had been removed from search results, adding that it would not tolerate any attempts to manipulate searches. "The quality of our index and search results is of the utmost importance to Google," the company said in a statement.
The moral behind this story is that if you are considering resorting to so called black hat SEO techniques - don't! It could seriously damage your business.
Click to go back to Elite Business Solutions' Blog