BMW Germany Gets Google Death Penalty

By Cheow Yu Yuan, July 16 2009

This article is written for brands who are engaging SEO services from SEO companies. SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via organic search results. Today, some SEO companies still use unethical methods to manipulate a website's rankings on search results.

In the most high-profile cases of unethical SEO studies, Google took the main BMW website off its search results listing. After Google investigated the website, they found that the German BMW website tries to manipulate search results to ensure top rankings when users search for "used car".

Google has now reduced the PR (PageRank) of BMW to zero. This means that the company website will no longer appear at the top of search results listing.

The reason why BMW website is given a death penalty by Google is because they used unethical SEO methods like doorway pages and keyword spamming to boost their rankings.

Ethical SEO is about creating website and content for users, not for search engines. Therefore, beware of any SEO companies that guarantee keywords or using aggressive link building strategies to manipulate search results. I believe you will not want to end up like BMW Germany. And if do end up like BMW, don't intend to call Google and talk your way out. It won't work.

The BBC website has more information on Google Blacklisting BMW.