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The German websites of car making giant BMW have recently run foul of Google's crackdown on search engine spam. The main issue appears to be the widespread use of what are known as landing or doorway pages. The idea behind these type of pages is that they enable a page to be set up targetting increasingly granular search terms. The German websites of car making giant BMW have recently run foul of Google's crackdown on search engine spam. The main issue appears to be the widespread use of what are known as landing or doorway pages. The idea behind these type of pages is that they enable a page to be set up targetting increasingly granular search terms. The main problem facing companies that have large numbers of potentially relevant keywords that they want to target is that if you try to optimise your home page for all of them it is counterproductive as the words begin to dilute each other. Google of course want you to solve this problem by buying Pay Per Click advertisements on Google Adwords for each individual keyword string. The other alternative is to set up individual pages for each particular keyword category ie. effectively run multiple home pages optimised differently for each target term. There is nothing inherently wrong with setting up doorway pages and in some situations they can actually be useful for visitors as it enables them to be fast tracked to an area of interest within the site, however as with most things in the SEO/SEM sphere the line between legitimate and illegitimate can be a little grey. The litmus test is the question of relevance. What BMW did wrong was that they set up these landing pages arbitrarily without regard to the words they were targeting. From the news reports the main issue appears to be that they targeted words such as 'Used Cars' on landing pages that had no relevance to second hand cars at all. The golden rule of setting up landing pages is that they have to match in content the specific keywords the page is optimised for. Someone searching for 'Used Cars' needs to see at least some content relevant to the topic. Where BMW went wrong is that they simply ignored the context of the search listing. In addition to it being risky from a search engine penalty perspective it also fails along usability lines. The principal goal may well be to up-sell the new arrival to the new 3 series sedan, however the page should at least pay lip service to the reason for the search in the first place. This could have been achieved quite simply. The page could have listed the contact details of authorised second hand BMW dealers. This would satisfy the relevance criteria. The rest of the page could have then been used to flog the latest models and convince a reader to upgrade. The catch is of course that these things can take time and effort to set up. It is tempting to go with the SEO trickster flogging link farms and auto generating landing pages covering every keyword you can think of. Many SE Spam techniques can be set up in hours and get results in days. The fall however can be even more dramatic. If a company the size of BMW can get its Google Page Rank wiped then it can happen to everyone. The lesson in this for anyone considering optimising their website for search engines is that anyone promising results in less than three months turnaround is likely to be using dodgy techniques. If you build your search strategy on dodgy foundations then the site will forever live with the risk of being consigned to search engine oblivion at the whim of Google. What do you think? Got an opinion about this article? Agree or disagree? Do you have an experience that you would like to share? Enedia invite readers to submit feedback on any articles or directory items that appear on site. Popular issues will be consolidated into frequently asked questions and forum threads to invite further discussion. Lets get talking. Respond to this article Or send an email to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it |
