BMW and the Reality Distortion Fields

Last week the news spread across the net, that Google would start an anti-spam campaign against foreign (say: non-US) websites in their index – threatening webmasters of being expunged from the index if they have used non-Google-authorized methods to enhance their result ranking. These proscribed methods, commonly abbreviated as black resp. dark SEO (search Engine Optimization), include techniques like doorway pages, cloaking and other stuff. So much for the background of the following story.

Last weekend another important news began to spread across the net – Google made an example of the threats announced a few days before and kicked several well-known German websites out of their index – among them the pages of bmw.de and automobile.de. At least for bmw.de this was no surprise – a German journalist named Mario Sixtus predicted the ban on february 1st 2006 – right after Google announced their new policy. The result of this ban is, that if you issue a search for “bmw.de” you will find anything but the BMW pages, and a closer look with an URI search proves the truth – at least for Google, the website bmw.de exists no more.

If Philipp Lenssen, another German blogger who is running the site Google Blogoscoped is true, then the German TV broadcast station SAT.1 and the Henkel corporation will be among the next “victims”. At least the company that was responsible for the BMW “optimizations”, netbooster.de, has been kicked out recently.

But let’s get back to BMW: their doorway pages, cloaking pages and stuff had to fulfill a explicit purpose – to bring bmw.de into the Google index and to improve the result ranking. An absurd detail on the brink is the fact that bmw.de were responsible theirselves that Google wouldn’t index their website – it’s unusable without activated Javascript coz of its ridiculous navigation. Mario Sixtus summarizes this with a short and firm claim down to the point (roughly translated from German into English):

How to avoid as a project leader to admit a mistake by trying to camouflage it with an even greater one

When news about the bmw.de ban from Google spread through the blogosphere (at least many German blogs have written about this topic, among them e.g. Webmaster & SEO Blog, CYB, unblogbar, Robert Basic and im web gefunden), it was clear as glass that these news will be picked up by the traditional media machine, and it seemed mandatory that BMW would take position on this issue as well.

This reaction by the Board of Directors from BMW took place today, and it is ridiculously laughable (wanted to stress that, sorry for the bad style ). Summed up, they proclaim to “having done this only for the customer’s virtue”, being not a manipulation of the search results but a service. I don’t understand why it should be an advantage for me to be redirected to the manufacturer’s site when I’m looking for a second-hand car – and fortunately Google can’t follow these thoughts as well (well, normally, I’d criticise Google’s strategy to delist only foreign websites, but on the other hand you’ve got to start somewhere).

Thomas Knüwer is not the only person who already thinks about the next great German PR “GAU” (worst case scenario). The German marketing blogger Gerold Braun writes on the popular German blog named werbeblogger about his thoughts, that this reaction of BMW’s management executives will grow to a desaster in terms of public relations (smart readers will recall the strange story around Heidi Klum and her father almost instantly) – and I conform with him totally.

We’re facing interesting times, like an old asian curse proclaims it

Last week the news spread across the net, that Google would start an anti-spam campaign against foreign (say: non-US) websites in their index - threatening webmasters of being expunged from the index if they have used non-Google-authorized methods to enhance their result ranking. These proscribed methods, commonly abbreviated as black resp. dark SEO (search ...