Wow, Google really don't like their listings being 'abused'. Google discovered that BMW Germany had been using 'Doorway Pages', pages which are stuffed full of keywords that the
site feels a need to be optimized for; however, as opposed to real
pages, this doorway is only displayed to the Googlebot. Human visitors
will be immediately redirected to another page upon visit.
When Google discovered this they reduced BMW.de's Page Rank down to 0, which means that no BMW.de pages will appear near the top of listings.
I wonder sometimes though, whether Google is playing fair in all this. When is a SEO technique acceptable? The aim of all SEO is to get higher rankings – I don't think that banning people because you don't like some SEO methods, but then allowing others to use other methods, is right.
Funnily enough I arranged a meeting at my company last week to go over
our search strategy and I recommend that we got a SEO specialist in to
optimise our sites. I guess I need to make sure now that whoever we
engage doesn't adopt any frowned upon techniques.
More: Google Blogoscoped
