swajames

That's right, and it makes sense most of the time. I had some experience of how Google does it on a recent trip, when I was in London opening Google got me directed to google.co.uk, I returned to the US via Canada and was directed to the google.ca site and got back to the US and was back to google.com as normal, all with no intervention from me.

swajames

That's not really an apples to apples comparision though Ice . Google generally localizes results and searches for local markets such as Germany so that search results are more relevant for most users most of the time. BMW's intentions (as described in the links I posted) were to increase the likelihood that certain specific searches were more likely to return a higher ranking for BMW pages. Google has some very advanced search language and tools that can get round the problems you described, unfortunately I don't think there is any general preference setting that you can use to force it to localize on any specific country or region (there probably should be).

ImolaRedM

How about using a public proxy server?

swajames

Yep - that's a good idea!

Iceman

BMW had door pages, because the real website was in Java or such, which the most search engines don't find when searching the web. So they put up the HTML page so that ppl can find the content. The content of the site was nothing else than what you were searching for. They did this for cutomer convenience, and Google is doing the same. For customer convenience they redirect you to their local gateway, even though you typed in the US gateway. Mainly that's because they want to bomb you with advertising in your language.
I think they should do it like CNN. You can select yourself if you get the local or the real cnn page.
So, it's not compariong two real different things. The idea behind it is the same, there's no difference. So they blamed BMW for something that is absolutely normal (unfortunately) on the internet and what they do themselfs.
If I type in google.com, I don't want google.de period!
If I search for some BMW stuff, and their site is Java and can't be detected by all search engines, and they put up a HTML site which redirects you to the content you are looking for, this is OK, IMHO.

swajames

Well, the issue wasn't what BMW were trying to do (which makes sense as you say) but how it was implemented. It was apparently a little more than you suggest - and of course not everyone gets temporarily "banned". There was a lot of info on this at the time it happened. The second link below is a blog of a Google employee.

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-02-01-n31.html

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-o...tional-webspam/

Iceman

Just by reading the second link I can't see why and where it is MORE than I allready said.

Quote:

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.?

The content the search engine got was the HTML page about BMW's new cars, the content the user got redirected at was a Java page with the same, BMW's new cars.
Only for technical reasons there was a HTML site. The content was NOT different! But on Google it IS, since google.com shows difefrent advertisings as the German page. So Google should start looking at their own stuff first, before making judgements on others!!!

swajames

Well, not quite! The content of the doorway and redirected pages was not the same, it was radically different. There were text references (for example 42 references to Gebrauchtwagen) in the doorway that appeared once or maybe twice in the HTML page. Multiple references like this are designed to do one thing - increase the Google ranking - and BMW itself appears to have accepted that it was a mistake and it corrected it. At the end of the day Google makes the rules about what is or isn't acceptable on Google.

Iceman

I just tried to enter the link provided in the blog.
If you do this, you get a BMW page which is pretty much empty, only providing a link that redirects you to the page that was shown before they had to remove the script for Google.
So, NOW there's no convenience at all, it only looks stupid.
Google forced BMW to do something silly which is unconvenient for the users.

I have never been a fan of Google and will never be.
I don't use them.

Iceman

Not at all.
BMW can NOT force Google into anything. If Google removes the sites for whatever reason, BMW can only do what they want them to do or don't. If don't, they will not be present in Google anymore.
The fact that they adjusted everything for Google is not meaning that BMW knew they made a mistake, it's only a business decission, it's about being present or not.

For me, Google sux. And that has nothing to do with the BMW story.