What are “bad” internet business practices?

6th February 2006

Well, here’s the best example I’ve seen in a long time…

This past week, BMW got removed from the Google search engine results in Germany.

Why? Because they were showing Google one thing, and the public something else, which violates Google’s Terms of Service agreement.

Do you really think BMW had to try to trick Google into ranking them high? If they can’t legitimately be the number one resource for BMW information, then something is seriously wrong. Was it an intentional deception attempt put forth by their in-house marketing team? Or do you think they were just led astray by a bad SEO company looking for short term gains, which would be my guess? Either way, there’s really no excuse for this, and I wonder how many people will get fired!

For the details on exactly what happened and how to BMW, here’s the link to the story, right from Matt Cutts at Google…
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » Ramping up on international webspam