Search engine marketing: Google removes Bmw.de from its index

The leading internet search engine has removed BMW's German website - www.bmw.de - from its index. An attempt had been made to manipulate Google results in favor of BMW. As reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, BMW must now submit an application to be reinstated in the index and give assurances that there will be no more attempts at manipulation in future. BMW must also name those responsible. Google search results are sorted according to relevance, and there are various ways to manipulate the results. Some of these are regarded by Google as a breach of the rules and punished with a temporary exclusion from the search index. In the case of BMW, the users who clicked on the link displayed on Google were shown a different page than the Google indexing robot. The user was redirected to a page with new car offers, while the Google robot was shown a text page on which the word "new car" appeared very frequently. The generation of "keyword pages" for robots is a trick that is used relatively frequently to achieve better rankings in the list of search results. Google had previously limited itself to blocking English-language pages. As reported by heise.de, this year the company plans to start excluding all other websites with undesirable manipulations from the search results. In addition to Bmw.de, Automobile.de was also affected by the measure. The problem there was that Automobile.de only provided searchers with an excerpt from the database containing word clusters. Although the words were the ones actually searched for, Google also considered this to be an attempt at manipulation.