BMW Germany Corporate Web Site gets Blacklisted by Google ... then Pardoned
If you don't play by the rules the big ruler comes out and smacks your knuckles very hard. That's always been the threat of using blackhat search engine optimization techniques to improve the organic or natural search results for your site.
Good SEO consultants have long begged their customers to avoid using the so-called blackhat techniques in favor of whitehat or cooperative techniques.
Someone at BMW corporate online marketing in Germany wasn't listening or perhaps it was an overzealous Web intern. The main BMW corporate Web site at www.bmw.de recently used one of the oldest tricks in the blackhat book - JavaScript redirection pages. This technique creates a Web page full of keywords that the site hopes to garner (in the case of BMW Germany, one of the keywords was "used cars") then as a live user clicks to the page they are immediately redirected to the BMW home page at www.bmw.de.
Google caught on and did what they usually do to Web sites that engage in such techniques ... BMW Germany was at the receiving end of what is known in the industry as the "Google death penalty" - they were blacklisted and removed from the Google index. During the blacklist period, any keywords you would normally associate with BMW would not return any links to www.bmw.de.
For Web sites with less clout than BMW there is very little you can do to be released from the penalty box. Most companies who are sent to the blacklist usually end up buying a new domain name and starting over. If you depend on Google it pays to befriend someone in Google tech support to help act as your advocate and to help you with some of these thorny issues.
But it's clearly better never to be put in this position ... "Just say NO to black hat techniques!"
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