Ramping up on international webspam

Remember my previous post noting that Google would be paying more attention to webspam in other countries and languages this year? This week our webspam team continued ramping up our anti-spam efforts by removing bmw.de from our index, and ricoh.de will be removed soon for similar reasons.

When a search engine visited a page like www.bmw.de/bmw-neuwagen.html, it would see a page like this:

example 1: Search Engine view

However, a user’s browser would immediately trigger a JavaScript redirect to a completely different url which looked like this:

example 2: user view

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.”

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.

Finally, as long as we’re on the subject of cars: to the domestic car maker whose European domain had hidden text on the front: your 30 day removal was set to expire in two days, but the hidden text has been taken off the page, so I’m scheduling the domain for reinclusion now.