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Google Delists BMW-Germany
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sun Feb 05, 2006 09:11 PM
from the wild-wild-west-of-internet-search dept.
from the wild-wild-west-of-internet-search dept.
Raenex writes "The car maker BMW has had its German website bmw.de delisted from Google. The delisting was punishment for using deceptive means to boost page ranking, which has now been set to zero for BMW. Matt Cutts, a Google employee who works to stop unethical search manipulation, originally reported the delisting in his blog and suggests that camera maker Ricoh is not far behind."
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Although this seems "reasonable" in light of the.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:4, Insightful)
They were spamming, they broke the rules google set, bammo, pagerank=0.
They're still listed on Yahoo (and other search engines).
If google nuked the pagerank of someone who isn't intentionally spamming, like slashdot, we'd all have a right to be screaming bloody murder. But this makes perfect sense.
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO the lesson is: Monopoly isn't good, even if the monopolist isn't evil.
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Insightful)
Bollocks. If you design your web site in such a way to properly and openly reflect your business or whatever, no problems. If you attempt to defraud or otherwise screw search engine results then google (and hopefully other search engines) has every right to get shitty. From a consumer perspective I want my google results to best reflect what I am looking for. If google has to delist fraudulent web sites to improve my search results, then they are just doing a good job.
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like fraud to me.
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Re:No, Google is only dictating how you Do No Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
I see absolutely no reason to blame Google in this instance. Redirecting certain users based on the client they are using to different content is directly against the spirit of the 'net... Redirecting to different data based on the users' client can be good for only a couple of things: 1) joke sites that tell IE users to switch to some other browser 2) intelligent redirecting to a page with mostly the same content, but formatted to be friendly to portable devices.
Pagerank whoring aside, I still think BMW's web designer was in the wrong--as if there could be any confusion about bmw.de in the first place, I'm sure there's a half bazillion German websites linking to that site, putting it at place #1 by default. I guess that it's just a matter of Google breaking their foot off in BMW's ass for being stupid.
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Re:No, Google is only dictating how you Do No Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is thus continuing to make *my* life good. Which is why they remain the most used search engine.
Despite a long time of watching Google with a wary eye, the only honestly bad thing about Google that I can think of is that they retain personally identifying search profile information beyond 30 days (whereas search.aol.com [aol.com] doesn't, and that only came up very recently).
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Insightful)
His argument is like saying the latest spam mail that got pasted my filter and my spot subject line check had to be designed that way so that it could get to the user.
It takes the position that the user WANTS to be marketed too, and that ANY method at all to have them be markted to by you is legitimate.
Well, if the user wouldnt want to be markted to you under "honest" conditions, then you shouldnt essentially attempt to get around those conditions.
This is the same with google, google is in the business of providing ME and other users like me with the BEST search results. If that means that under regular best practices you wouldnt even get in the top level, it isnt UP TO YOU AS A COMPANY to "help" the user find you by getting past the methods the user has in place to protect themselves. google is my tool of choice to protect myself from bad search results, and I want it to stay a usefull tool for that.
I dont want to go back to the old days were you could type "cartoon" and get search sites in the first 100 results all saying "cant find entry for cartoon, but you can try to buy cartoon at ebay using our referrer id" bullcrap.
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'whims' of Google's that you're complaining about are just common sense. Google says, make your page clear and informative. If your page is clear and informative, guess what? Google ranks it higher. If your page is clear and informative and has something interesting to say, other people will find it interesting and link to it. If other people link to it, guess what? Google ranks it higher. Google says, don't change your URLs too often. That's common sense, too. If you ceaselessly redesign your site, leaving old URLs dangling as 404 errors, you're hurting people who link to you, and you're hurting people who've bookmarked you. That's common sense, too. All my bookmarks to my bank's site no longer work, because every time they do a redesign they change their URLs, and leave the old ones dangling. Sooner or later, that's going to annoy me enough to make me change banks.
If you do a Google search for 'Simon Brooke [google.co.uk]', you'll find me at the top although my home page is just that, a personal home page, and has no 'optimisation'. Simon Brooke [simonbrooke.com] the Insurance Broker, with an expensive, professionally designed site, comes second. Then there's Simon Brooke [imdb.com] the professional actor on IMDB, then a guy who's into aeroplanes, then Simon Brooke [simonsays.com] the author.
So with all those people with something to sell in the list, how come I and the aeroplane geek make the first page? My site is simple and has been there a long time (more than ten years now, and on the same URL for eight). In that time a lot of people have linked to it, and it doesn't suffer link rot. The plane geek's page gets ranked well because he has good pictures which presumably get linked to.
And that's the lesson for all you soi disant web designers [simonsays.com] out there. Users aren't impressed with your fancy, flash 'splash pages', and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with text as graphics, and guess what? Google isn't either. Users aren't impressed with vacuous marketing puff, and guess what? Google isn't either.
If you've got something interesting and different to say, and you say it clearly, and you say it consistently in the same place, Google will find you. Tricks and cheats aren't needed.
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Insightful)
Evil? Off hand, I would say that Google is STILL the top
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is saying that they want to be fair to their customers (you and me).
Their customers are advertisers. Their product is you and me.
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Google != Microsoft, sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm amazed by the hordes of people who like Google-bashing. Nope. Microsoft has constructed a high barrier to entry in their market. You have to overcome application compatibility, user retraining, and lack of Microsoft applications (which means your business documents aren't necessarily compatible).
Google is a search engine. Going to Google is going to a website. If they get even slightly less good than someone else, users can easily go elsewhere -- as evidenced by how quickly Google took over from Yahoo and Altavista.
Google isn't shafting users here. They are working to provide incentive *not* to hire search engine spammers and keep information useful. If the alternative is letting me get shafted by search engine spammers, Google is doing the right thing.
If they provide a clear set of rules, spammers will work up to the very edge of them. If they simply let people know that severe, repeated abuse will result in a penalization in their own database, they reduce spam in their database. I'm all for this move.
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Re:Google != Microsoft, sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
When are they going to delist the many, many sites that seem to be created wholely for users looking for an obscure product, however, when you go to the page it is yet another "index" page full of advertisements, often without reference to the product that the user was looking for.
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Re:Google != Microsoft, sorry (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you can view the responses to atleast some of the questions on Expert Exchange. Just keep scrolling down past the several pages of ads and other crap. I still don't like the site though.
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Re:Google != Microsoft, sorry (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:4, Interesting)
A computer is unable to actually understand the site content in any meaningfull sense. That would require sentience. The Google spider will simply parse the site, and the search engine will do a word search from the database of parsed sites. The list returned this way needs to be ordered somehow, and structure is one valid way of doing this, since it gives hints of how various words may be related to each other in the page.
In short, your complain is stupid; now matter how Google ordered the results, you could always claim that it is unfair to you.
A Flash-based site is not a website. A website is HTML-based. What you have is a Flash file that happens to be reachable through the HTTP protocol, not a website. I don't know if Google can parse Flash at all, but if it does, be thankfull of that and don't complain.
And Flash is not user friendly, and everyone hates it. Don't kid yourself.
Well, for starters, your competitor used appropriate technology - HTML - so that his site is accessible to both humans and search engines, while you made a Flash file and pretended that to be a web site (which it is not). If you insist on putting information in a format that cannot be used effectively, don't be surprised that man and machine alike will skip it.
In short, your competitor has a better site than you do, so he gets a better pagerank.
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Insightful)
You know its "Google rank" as in Google determines the ranking of the page.
>In effect, google is dictating the terms upon which the entire web must operate
Its the users who still determine how the web operates. "We" determined Google is a good search engine and use it. Its quite easy to stop using Google if it starts giving bad information. "I'm looking for BMW in Germany, but Google sucks for that, I'm moving on to another search engine." Before Google there was another most popular search engine (Yahoo? Alta Vista? some Inktomi based site?) and it could easily change again.
I'm all for bashing Google, but its Google's ranking, its their choice.
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False Positives blow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one hope all the search engines take aggressive steps to curb and suppress the effectiveness of artificial hacks to improve results. If spamming isn't rewarding for the companies, maybe they'll learn to spend their resources on improving things like page readability, content and functionality instead.
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Insightful)
And this differs from any other search engine index since the dawn of time how? Any search engine uses some kind of ranking algorithm. It used to be that stuffing keywords in page titles affected it. That was a bad idea.
Google, like any other search engine has a primary customer to keep happy: me. I use their search engine to find useful data. Google does a much better job at solving *my* problems than any of their competitors. Great. I don't care even a little tiny bit about whether or not BMW is irritated about the fact that they hired some slimy SEO bastards and got smacked for it. Google is continuing to deliver useful content to *me*. If Google does a bad job of that, I'll use another search engine...but you know what? Google is still lightyears ahead of the competition. They *still* have a lighter-weight interface than the competition (which apparently still hasn't figured out that portals are not a replacement for search engines). They still do a good job of getting useful data, despite being the Big Dog that all the search engine spammers are gunning for.
More power to Google -- for making *my* life better.
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is that the "doorway pages" were stuffed full of german keyword terms like "used cars" and the content was repeated over and over again, with only the model names substituted.
It is garbage. If BMW didn't like the fact that pages didn't work as designed, they should have redesigned them, not presented a totally different set of content to the search engine bots.
Also, you seem to suggest that Google was at fault because it couldn't index the content properly, when, in fact, no search engine could index the site as is as it was designed.
Matt Cutts has a screen cap on his blog -
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-inter
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds dodgy to me.
Dodgy? Chrysler was doing this too?
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:4, Interesting)
The premise is different. The process is different. The consequences are different. The governing factors are different. I'd have a hard time coming up with something that is more unlike police abuse than this situation.
Google is a search engine. Other search engines exist. Using Google does not preclude one from searching on other search engines. Delisting a company from Google may suck for that company, but so what? It isn't like they're putting that company out of business - they're just no longer provind a *free* service to that company because they feel that the company didn't play by their rules.
If Google goes over the line - if they stop listing companies "just because," then people will eventually stop using them because they don't provide useful results. But also, if Google doesn't nuke sites that are breaking the rules, they won't provide useful results, and people will stop using them. It's a balancing act, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Honestly, it seems like everyone's scrambling to find some way to turn Google into the evil empire, another MSFT. Here's the thing - it can't happen because they aren't a monopoly, and they can't become a monopoly because the user investment is exactly zero and the barriers to switching to using another search engine are non-existent. If Google starts dicking people around, Google will see a quick response. With companies like MSFT - where users have to invest a substantial amount of money just to use the products - there's incentive not to switch, since you'd be throwing your "investment" away.
Do I like everything that Google does? Hell no. But I'm able to recognize that their business model is one that would make it very difficult for them to behave in anti-competitive ways withour fucking themselves badly in the process.
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Funny)
In related news, after being de-listed, the headquarters of BMW Germany ceased to exist. People coming to visit the headquarters found only a vast, dark vortex of nothingness, over which were visible huge glowing letters reading "Error 404: Page Not Found". The entire German management of BMW has disappeared as well, along with several nearby dairy farms and a brewery.
At a press conference, a reporter asked whether this sort of behavior fit with the company's "Do no evil" motto, or reflected a growing arrogance and malice on the part of Google. The Google spokesman declined to respond to the question. Instead his eyes briefly glowed red before the reporter spontaneously burst into flames and was consumed, leaving only a small pile of ashes on the floor.
The remaining reporters had no further questions.
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th (Score:4, Insightful)
For more obscure sites, this is a harsher punishment, for major corporations who base web wite is obvious, it doesn't really make much of a difference (the children at BMW in this case deserved to have their hands smacked, it was after all a pretty silly and pointless thing for them to do).
In many ways a perfect example of Google's publicy declared control system working in practice and just a bit of a warning to smaller companies where this kind of behaviour would have a significant affect. Google preserving the rights of the many for a quality search service against the greed of a few, in my book that fits pretty well with "do no evil".
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Re:Power for optimum profit (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has achieved its remarkable success by focusing on customer satisfaction and the end user experience. The whole reason they are so powerful is because the average joe trusts them to do a lot of filtering and ranking so as to provide valuable search results.
That's a very simple point, and I didn't use any fancy "functions of self interest," but a lot of people seem to have a hard time understanding it. This situation is similar to the hypothetical case where Roger Ebert stops reviewing movies from, say, MGM, because they start providing him with different versions of the movies than they actually release. In that case, he'd have every right to say "because I can't accurately review the content which is delivered to my audience, I won't review it at all."
Google is a company (wow!). They want to achieve profits and shareholder value (oh no!). So far, they have accomplished those by offering a customer experience that is superior to their competitors, thereby gaining more eyeballs and ad revenue. This bit of news is exactly in line with what they've always done, albeit more high profile, and seems to indicate that they value the quality of their DB above, say, ad revenue from a gigantic company (should BMW choose to boycott ads).
I found your "discovery" that "over the next few years" Google will have self-interest as a priority, and the implied derision baseless. Can you elaborate on why that's a bad or surprising thing? What, exactly, do they owe you that you think they won't deliver?
Cheers
-b
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Blog Link (Score:5, Informative)
Sheesh.
The 'blogosphere (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The 'blogosphere (Score:5, Interesting)
Because with googlebombing what Google is showing you is what a small number of motivated people want you to see, not what you want to see. The fact that people involved in a googlebomb want to see something does not make it what the majority of people want to see. And making it circular by saying that people now expect to see the results of a succesful googlebomb when they search for failure is just sophistry.
But [google.com.au] really [google.com.au], do [google.com.au] you [google.com.au] expect [google.com.au] to [google.com.au] get [google.com.au] anything [google.com.au] meaningful [google.com.au] out [google.com.au] of [google.com.au] a [google.com.au] search [google.com.au] on [google.com.au] single [google.com.au] semi-random [google.com.au] words [google.com.au] on [google.com.au] Google [google.com.au]?
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Which Domestic Car Maker? (Score:4, Interesting)
Finally, as long as we're on the subject of cars: to the domestic car maker whose European domain had hidden text on the front: your 30 day removal was set to expire in two days, but the hidden text has been taken off the page, so I'm scheduling the domain for reinclusion now.
Hang on, I'll Google for it (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh... (Score:5, Funny)
Deception (Score:5, Interesting)
I really and truly dislike deception. Its very common, especially when money is involved for some reason.
To me, I look at "work" simply. Work is getting paid for doing things for people that they appreciate. The more unique or the more quality or quantity of things that you bring to people, the more money you will get.
Much of advertising is deceptive. 99.999% of SPAM is completely deceptive. And personally, it really irritates me. Don't get me started about the snail mail I get with things like "Check enclosed". Grrrr.
At least here in the US, BMW is a very desired car. Many consider it a status symbol. Their slogan here is "The Ultimate Driving Machine". I don't know what their status is in Germany.
Good for Google, bad for BMW. TFA says that Ricoh might be next for delisting. One thing I wish Google would do is get Froogle out of beta, and separate the search results for buying things and having information about things. Believe it or not, when I do a search for a digital camera or some other product, I may want to learn something about the product before I buy it. And yes, I do use Google for searching for something to buy. I've found $2-3 parts to fix things that I simply could not have found at a local store.
Re:Deception (Score:4, Interesting)
This is quite simply not true, and even a cursory examination of the products on the shelves of your local grocery or department store will disabuse you of this utopian notion pretty quickly. Price and quality are important, but it is arguable whether they are the most important factors in the success of a product, and quality is largely subjective anyway.
Marketing is the manipulation of perceptions, and that is what really drives sales. Wal-Mart offers neither the best quality nor the lowest prices, for example, but they have successfully convinced a very large number of people that they do, and that's as good as the real thing. There are a lot of market forces at work in the success or failure of a product, and it is often the case that the best products and the hardest-working people fail miserably.
Mind you, I don't think this is the way it should be, but absent some really far-reaching regulation, that's just the way it is in a free market, and it's why there are degrees in things like business and marketing. And yes, virtually all of the other factors amount to unscrupulous behavior to one degree or another. If you'd like that to change, the first step lies in recognizing the market as it actually is.
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Ripoffs from Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? SE Cloaking / Stealth is slimy (Score:5, Informative)
IMO, they and many others deserve to be delisted for attempting to game the system. The only SE tactic more disgusting is spamming blogs for free pagerank boosts.
The best legit means to increase your rank is simply to have quality content that people WANT to link to, and which is intelligently marked up (e.g. use header tags for important stuff; not sliced up images that semantically mean nothing).
Re:Oh that's really good (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Oh that's really good (Score:5, Informative)
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Correct (Score:4, Insightful)
www.BMW.com comes up as #4 or so... kinda freaky.
Makes you wonder if there will ever bea "common carrier" law for search engines.
-Rick
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Re:Oh that's really good (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think we have too much to worry about. The power Google has in this is because it is the most popular search engine. As soon as they start abusing the power and delisting major sites, then there will certainly be another search engine that will take its place. So it is in its best interest to behave well.
The bottom line is that Google wants to be the best search engine it can be. It doesn't do that by not indexing mass amounts of companies. It also doesn't do it by alowing webmasters to get themselves at the top of the results just because of some tricks. So it must walk a fine line. In fact its best bet is to delist one or two high profile companies and make a big deal about it, so that it discourages other companies from following them.
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Re:SEO? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the difference?
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Re:SEO? (Score:4, Interesting)
-Chris
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Re:Google says they don't do this. (Score:5, Insightful)
If I randomly list four restaurants, they are random. Not choosing to include a fifth on the list doesn't make the list order non-random. It just means that restaurant #5 isn't on the list. Non-inclusion isn't changing order or content; it is defining what is in the database to be searched.
This is about abuse control and removing invalid sites, not reordering valid sites that conform to their pagerank guidelines. They say "Alternately, your page may have been manually removed from our index if it didn't conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank".
Google's Guidelines [google.com]
--
Evan
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Re:This is ridiculous behavior on Google's part. (Score:4, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why Google is going out of their way to punish BMW for using SEO strategies to up their pagerank
Because it's a deliberate attempt to deceive the search engine. That's bad for any end user doing a search as it gives them wrong results. Why is that hard to understand?
instead of chasing all the other junk (porn, pharmaceuticals, etc. websites that do the same with far more malicious intent.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Do you want google to eliminate searches for pharmaceuticals and porn? Or do you believe Google isn't stopping people who do inappropriate SEO techniques for drugs and porn?
And on the off chance that Google is trying to 'make an example' by punishing a big company like BMW, someone there needs to be hit with the clue hammer; no disrespectable SEO slinger is going to pay attention to that sort of thing.
Are you kidding? Being delisted by Google is a Big Deal. The rogue SEO companies won't go away right away, but eventually everyone will hear about getting delisted from Google for doing this garbage and the rogue SEO companies will all but disapear. If you seriously think that BMW.de being delisted by google won't make BMW change their deceptive website, I think it's you that needs to be hit with a "clue hammer".
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Re:This is ridiculous behavior on Google's part. (Score:5, Insightful)
A company of that size does not NEED to use black hat techniques. Google's algorythms are good enough that a company of that size is almost always the top search (the only time I have not seen that is when there were two large companies with similar names). Using these techniques make it easier, but they are not needed.
Also note, it does set an example. They are not going after *just* bmw.de.
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Re:well, they DID break the law! (Score:4, Interesting)
Google's job is to get me useful information.
This makes Google's interests and my interests very well aligned.
The job of SEOers is to prevent me from getting useful information. Google just sent a severe smack out towards people using SEOers. I'm cheering all the way.
Tell you what. You don't like it, you can go set up a search engine that *advocates* abuse by SEOers, and try and get people to use that. Have fun.
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Re:Is this restraint of trade? (Score:4, Insightful)
You said it yourself: google isn't a directory service. Nobody pays to be included. Google can exclude a site for a number of reasons, which are all easily accessible on their site. Is says specifically that websites which do not adhere to the rules may be removed from the index.
When you search for something innoculous and get porn back, or one of those useless link farms, it is because of techniques like this. Maybe BMW was using them for good purposes, maybe not. Tough luck. They did something wrong, their pagerank was set to zero, as it should be. It's what I'd want to see happen to the porn and the link farms, it's what I'd want to see happen to anyone else who tried the same low, deceptive tricks.
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Re:.de ? (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realise BMW is a German company and selling a quarter of their cars at home, don't you?
www.bmw.com is a portal, with links to invertor relations and so on. You can get to the country sites from there, and the international site happens to be available in German, but generally, using your local country domain directly will take you to a consumer site, in your langue, with localised pricing. Consumers usually expect a big company to have a local version of their site.
Anyway, this is about search results, not the location bar. Linked sites on bmw.de will simply not show up.
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