Google recently sentenced the German websites for BMW and Ricoh to removal from their indexes, aka the "Google Death Penalty." Both sites made it back into the Google index in about three days. But what were their crimes? Why did they happen? And how can we avoid having our own sites face the death penalty?
Early in February 2006, Google watchers and the SEO community were taken somewhat by surprise by a blog entry from Matt Cutts. For those who might not know, this Google engineer has developed quite a following by writing about search engine optimization in addition to the usual blog topics. In an earlier entry, Cutts had stated that Google would begin paying more attention to search engine spam originating from countries other than the U.S., and in languages other than English. On February 5, he reported in his blog that the search engine giant had turned word into deed.

Google removed the German website for carmaker BMW from its index, as well as the German website for camera maker Ricoh. While the delisting lasted for only three days, it sent mild shivers through the SEO community. Even news outlets that don’t normally show much interest in covering the topic chimed in with their surprise. As was widely pointed out, BMW and Ricoh are the highest profile companies to date to suffer the “Google death penalty.” Exactly what happened?

Cutts made it graphically clear in his blog. He displayed a picture of what a search engine spider visiting the home page of the German BMW website saw, and what a user’s browser saw. They were starkly different. The spider would see a page full of text and not much else, while the web surfer would see a more standard-looking web page with pictures of automobiles and not too much text.

The key point is that the page the spider saw contained the words “gebrauchtwagen” and “neuwagen” many tens of times. Those are the German words for “used car” and “new car.” The home page that web surfers see uses each of those words maybe twice. This little trick was accomplished with the use of a JavaScript redirect. And the implication of the maneuver, as at least one wag noted, was that BMW must have thought it owned the information superhighway just like BMW drivers think they own the regular highway. This attempt to score high in the search engine rankings was surely aimed at sending those looking for new or used BMWs to the BMW German site, rather than to, for example, an independent car dealership.

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