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February 2, 2006
BMW Germany Dinged For Doorway Spam
How about a little old skool search spam? OK, Philipp over at Google Blogoscoped points out in BMW's Doorway Pages that the automaker is employing hidden content on its web site in Germany. Search engines see one thing; humans another. It's cloaking, but not IP based, more of the "poor man's" variety that uses JavaScript.
Look at this page. You'll see nice, pretty pictures of BMWs. Philipp then illustrates how when you turn off JavaScript, you get a page of completely different content, including the use of the word "used car" 42 times in what appears to be a gibberish doorway page. That's a page where the sentences may look like they are saying something to a search algorithm but make no sense to a human reader.
When I disable JavaScript, I actually don't see what Philipp got. Instead, I get a page telling me that I need to have JavaScript to view the site. Part of this seems to be due to some redirection going on. But here's an easy way to see what Google's actually being shown -- this page from the Google cache.
Posted by Danny Sullivan at February 2, 2006 12:19 PM
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