Paying the Ultimate Search Engine Price

No matter how big your company is, if you break the rules you will be punished.  Matt Cutts of Google wrote in his blog over the weekend that BMW.de (BMW's German website) has been removed from Google's index.  It seems that the company's website was delivering keyword rich text to the Search Engines and totally different content to human visitors.

This technique is called Doorway pages and is very deceptive.  Matt wrote:

That’s a violation of our webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”

BMW is not the only major corporation to be caught.  Ricoh was creating similar doorway pages and will be removed shortly.  Their only recourse now is to remove the offending code and contact Google for possible re-inclusion.

Don't treat your search engine optimization efforts as a get rich quick scheme.  You may be successful in the short term, but if caught, you'll pay the ultimate price!

***UPDATE***

As of the the evening of February 7th, both BMW and Ricoh have removed the offending pages and have been re-instated into Google's index.