Tag archives: google death penalty

BMW suffers of Google death penalty

In Germany, BMW has been trying to artificially boost the popularity ranking of its site. The mighty Google found out the automaker was cheating and apparently kicked it out of its index. As reported on several blogs, BMW has been caught employing doorway pages to attract search engines spiders. While BMW almost immediately removed the pages after the news broke (after having them live for almost 2 years), apparently it was too late. German BMW are now suffering what is known as the “Google death penalty”: a ban from almost any imaginable top search result, and a degrading of the PageRank to the lowest possible value.