On January 11th, Matt Cutts warned us about Google’s upcoming efforts to clean up it’s indices of Spam on an international level. Can’t say there was no warning.
On February 4th, it happened and it happened BIG. According to Matt Cutts, of Google, the bmw.de website has been removed from the Google index for a number of tactics that violate the webmaster quality guidelines.
Certainly many smaller players have been removed and have gone unnoticed. With the BMW website, the news is definitely making the headlines and hopefully setting a precedent.
Since February 4th, when Cutts wrote about it, the website is back in the index, but certainly with entirely different rankings for keywords such as “Gebrauchtwagen” and “Neuwagen.”
Sources:
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Marina Zaliznyak
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On Tuesday evening, Cutts wrote in his blog that BMW.de had been re-included in the Google database after removing the redirect pages. According to BMW, they created the doorway because some items on its site were created using Java and so those items weren’t being detected by search engines.
As a BMW fan, I wish google had notified BMW that they found its practices offensive before removing the site and announcing that to the public. If Eric Schmidt was BMW CEO, he Would prevent selling BMW cars to google staff(Remember google schmidt not to talk with new york times last summer? :).