SEO Blog

Check out Nathan Wenberg’s blog for details.

Here’s a tip — obey the search engine rules if you want to succeed. Even the most high profile companies are not safe in the engines if they ignore the rules. Just ask BMW. BMW’s German site was recently removed from Google’s index for employing questionable marketing tactics. And it wasn’t just bumped down in the rankings — apparently all of its pages were completely nuked from the index.

Not that a company like BMW has to worry too much about being found on the Internet. In fact, they’ll be back where they were in a matter of time, after they make the required adjustments. But this only goes to show how much smaller companies rely on compliance with engines like Google if they want to succeed. No one is safe.

What rules did BMW violate? Matt Cutt’s gave the low down in his blog. The BMW site displayed different content to the Google spiders compared to what users see. Instead of content rich text pages, a Javascript redirects users to a flashy brochure page.

Check out Google’s Webmasters Guidelines for more information on the rules.

Update: Well said Jeremy.