Google’s page rank method can be as lucrative as it is powerful, and it is tempting to try to fiddle with the system. Some forms search engine optimization are acceptable; others aren’t. One such approach–the use of a so-called doorway page–has apparently thrown BMW into reverse.
According to media reports, the word gebrauchtwagen or “used cars,” appeared 42 times on the doorway page of the carmaker’s German site. Doorway pages, for the uninitiated, are Web pages with little or no content that exist almost solely to redirect Web surfers elsewhere. Google’s search technology doesn’t like the pages and apparently slammed the door on BMW, dropping its page rank to 0.
Matt Cutts, the Google engineer famous for his blog discusses this incident along with the removal of a Ricoh web site for similar transgressions.
It appears that at least some of the JavaScript-redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google’s webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We’ll probably also need some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded. I’m leaving comments turned off on this post; there are no doubt plenty of other search engine optimization areas to discuss this.