Papewaio
02-06-2006, 01:20
Google 'death penalty' for BMW site (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/02/06/1139074113688.html)
Luxury car maker BMW has had its German website blacklisted by Google after it was caught trying to artificially boost its popularity ranking on the world's leading internet search engine.
The delisting was reported by several bloggers and later confirmed in a blog post by Google software engineer Matt Cutts wrote that the methods used by BMW were a violation of the search engine's guidelines.
The sanction - known colloquially as the "Google death penalty" - means that a Google search for terms like "BMW" or "BMW Germany" will not return a direct link to the car company's German website, bmw.com.de.
I wonder if they should get hit with a class action lawsuit too for wasting peoples time when searching for a used car? :laugh4:
Luxury car maker BMW has had its German website blacklisted by Google after it was caught trying to artificially boost its popularity ranking on the world's leading internet search engine.
The delisting was reported by several bloggers and later confirmed in a blog post by Google software engineer Matt Cutts wrote that the methods used by BMW were a violation of the search engine's guidelines.
The sanction - known colloquially as the "Google death penalty" - means that a Google search for terms like "BMW" or "BMW Germany" will not return a direct link to the car company's German website, bmw.com.de.
I wonder if they should get hit with a class action lawsuit too for wasting peoples time when searching for a used car? :laugh4: