Google Blacklists BMW

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German car company, BMW, was reportedly using doorway pages to artificially boost their search engine rank on Google. However, the big “G” found out and gave BMW the search rank of death, zero.

So what is a “doorway” page and why was Google upset about BMW using them?

A doorway, or gateway page, is a common technique used by web marketing firms to manipulate search results and lure people to a specific site. Here’s an example of a doorway page for handbags. As you can see, the page is nothing more than blocks of text with repeated key search words. There is no real content on this page. But if you mix a link you want to promote with competitors links and keywords, this will boost your site’s page rank on Google.

BMW created several of these doorway pages filled with words like “neuwagon”, which means new car in German. Once a user landed on one of these doorway pages, they were automatically redirected to BMW’s website which has less text and more pictures, which is more attractive but a page with less text will score lower in Google’s PageRank system.