BMW Banned by Google
BMW Germany has been banned by Google for “black hat” SEO techniques.
BMW.com is a nice PR 7 web site and loved by Google, with over 3,000 incoming backlinks displaying. But now BMW.de (their German site) has been banned by Google.
As you can see by the image below, is a “manual ban,” i.e., a Googler (employee of Google, Inc.) has gone into the system and removed the bmw.de web site from their index. You can tell because of the two bullet points, and the fact that no pages display for a site:bmw.de search.
The site has been removed for black hat techniques like dynamically generated doorway pages. Right now, the only sites I can find that are talking about it are Chinese and MattCutts.com, but stay tuned. Things like this are always great forum fodder. (Also from Matt Cutts: www.ricoh.de has been removed as well.)
Posted by Brad Fallon on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 10:20 am 
Wow…a big corporation doing Black-Hat SEO…hmmmmm
Nice to know that the big boys can get their hand slapped by Google just like the rest of us!
Mark
Health, Wealth, And Other Culinary Musings From A Renaissance Chef
You know, it *is* good that this happens… but not for the big vs. little reasoning.
I think google needs to take a look at the bias against dynamically generated content. Semantically, it’s not really any different than amazon reading your cookie and serving up information that they know is helpful to you.
I think the bottom line should be: “Does the content provided help the user?” Dynamic and static should be a non-issue.
It’s certainly not like BMW is doing bait and switch tactics… they’re just tailoring content to the vistor based on referral info. Google is splitting hairs.
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Wow… in google there is a “whole lot of shakin going on”. Right now there appears to be some major shifting on their datacenters… no need to fear though, because good quality sites with rich content still are being given place in their engines
Nice crib rail covers and teething rails
I just went to that website and it appears to be loading just fine. I don’t see that it is banned.
Rob-
Belt Buckles
Rob, I don’t think the website is banned from the internet. If someone searched for it in google, it just wouldn’t come up.
I think google is sending the right message by banning them. They’re letting big companies know that there is no “special” treatment for being a big corporation.
-Dominique
It’s a nice story. It might make some other big name websites rethink some tactics.
In a related story, at lease one website was selling links from it’s PR8 homepage on Ebay. When the auction started it was PR8 at least, after running or a few days the home page dropped to PR0. I noticed that another site had their homepage drop from PR8 to PR4.
Brad, have you ever considered teaching a module in your seminars on “black hat”? You know stuff that a) works and b) can get you into trouble. I’d love to know shortcuts and then decide for myself, kind of like trying smoking and drinking in high school…..
You would have thought a company like BMW would have known better, or maybe they do and its the seo team that should know better.
Wow, even the big guys can see what it’s like to not follow the rules.
I wonder what seo company will be fired for this?
Secondly, what black hat stuff were they using so we can stay away from anything that looks like black hat?
Hey does anyone know when the stomper video’s will be available or did I miss the release of them?
Stomping the search engines is the most valueable tool in my SEO resources, would recommend it to any one looking to start their own web business..
Google does seem to be turning the screw a litle bit at the moment. Are they experimenting?
I notice Googles own home page has only a PR4 at the moment, yet its interior pages are still high PR9′s.
Anyone else noticed this?
I am beginning to feel as if I am in a game of Monopoly,only it’s Google designed not Hasbro. Instead of real estate to snatch up I’ve got hoops to jump through that keep changing.
While I continue to place my marker on the world wide web board to play, I wouldn’t mind some postivie sign that all my SEO work will actually get my site in front of live people!
With AOL/Yahoo charging us soon to send emails my head is swimming.
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BMW gets caught cloaking and gets deindexed and a week later gets reindexed.
What a crock of crap!
Check it out for yourself.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/recent-reinclusions/
I am sticking strictly to “white hat” by building all of my sites by hand and adding good old fashioned content. Until they start penalizing that, I’ll keep doing it.
Thanks!
CD
Hi Gwendolyn,
I saw your post earlier about aol/yahoo charging to send emails??? Could you explain what that’s all about?
I would greatly appreciate more information on that.
About your own issues, what have you been seeing or not seeing that has you discouraged maybe I can offer some tips?
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There is a big update going on in google now and they are testing new datacenters.
Astralscents
BMW is back in Google. Only after 2 days. What the hell is that? Other sites get banned for months.
The writing is on the wall. Money talks. Google could give a rat’s ass about little websites.
i was just about to write the same thing eric wrote, and agree, ad money talks bigtime?
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BMW got back into google.
I heard about this too right away and saw how many people started to speculate, but like anything, wait a little and the true circumstances comes to light. Black hat… LOL!
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Getting banned is no fun. A friend of mine got banned accidently – in other words, he doesn’t know what he did. He has been trying for 5 months to get relisted and he is still not back in. I hope Google lightens up on their ban penalty length as this is killing the small guy.
Telemarketed Mortgage Leads
blame the over priced corporate seo consultant…
lucky for bmw..the make it back instantly.. i wonder what happened to the other dick, harry & tom
I heard about this.I would greatly appreciate more information on that.
I wonder what seo company will be fired for this?
BMW Germany has been banned by Google for “black hat” SEO techniques. What?
Brads Linkmetro offers substandard customer support. That is being kind.
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Does anybody actually think Microsoft can become serious competitors to dominating Google?
Because Google is so much easier to use than MSN Search! And every where you look there isn’t adverts all over!
[...] foreign and domestic. They may spam, form dubious link networks, and can end up getting a client banned from the search [...]
[...] big names are not immune from penalties for using dubious promotion techniques. After all Google banned the German BMW website for using blackhat [...]