Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed has an interesting take on Google’s recent delisting of BMW’s German site.
Two things to consider:
1. Was this actually done by a human being? I’m positive that Google must run “human” style web bots as well as the classic “Googlebot” (whose identifiable user-agent is keyed off by cloakers).
Can you blame Google for a capricous algorithm?
2. This is far from arbitrary. Google is particuarly keen on this issue and it’s hardly a secret that cloaking = banning. Google’s guidelines clearly state sites should:
Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
This was just a plain dumb move from BMW’s side. They might as well have crammed their meta-keywords list full of “hot sexy” keywords to complete their “web page optimization”.
It would have been far more arbitrary if Google had given BMW a free pass instead of treating them like every other site that uses tactics deliberately designed to fool you and me.