BMW's German page has been expunged from Google's search-results, apparently in retaliation for BMW's use of sleazy "doorway pages" that display different content to search-engine crawlers in order to fool them into valuing those pages more highly. A Google employee has confirmed the "Google Death Penalty" for BMW on his blog.
This willingness to punish wrongdoing even when it comes from big companies is a marked contrast with the anti-virus companies that had to be arm-twisted into releasing updates to their products to catch and remove the spyware and rootkits that Sony music was caught distributing on millions of music CDs.
It appears that at least some of the JavaScript- redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google's webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We'll probably also need some assurances that such pages won't reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded. I'm leaving comments turned off on this post; there are no doubt plenty of other search engine optimization areas to discuss this.
(via Digg)
