BBC misunderstandings of SEO

The BBC report on the recent delisting of the German BMW site for keyword spamming.

And - ouch - do they make some major blunders in describing what happened.

Firstly, there’s the propagation of the PageRank myth:

Google has now reduced BMW’s page rank to zero, ensuring the company no longer appears at the top.

So it requires a good PageRank value to rank in Google, according to the BBC. But this is a myth that is years old.

While PageRank almost certainly plays some part in ranking individual pages for individual keywords, overall the picture is far more complicated.

PageRank alone certainly didn’t ranks the German BMW site for searchs for “BMW”, but instead a range of factors, not least lots of people publishing links to the site with the keyword “BMW” in it.

Here’s another faux pas:

A BMW spokesman admitted the company used the doorway pages, a practice known as search engine optimisation

So - according to the BBC - Search Engine Optimisation is simply about creating keyword-stuffed doorway pages masked by sneaky JavaScript redirects.

Which is like saying that Information Technology is simply about about using Excel.

However, no wonder it was hard for the BBC to get basic information on the subject correct, when the public relations depts of both companies were already spinning information in the same article.

After all, according to a BMW spokesman:

“We did not provide different content in the search results to the final website,” Markus Sagemann told the BBC News website.

The results were certainly very different - here’s Matt Cutt’s screenshots.

Then there’s the statement from Google:

“The quality of our index and search results is of the utmost importance to Google,” the company said in a statement.

Google would continue to strive to protect the accuracy and quality of its results, it added.

Which is obviously not a principle universally applied, as - to be pedantic - their recent efforts on censorship in China have shown:

• Tiananmen Square on Google.com Images
• Tiananmen Square on Google.cn Images

And to cap it all off, to show just how badly the BBC can do, they include a single reference link to an external site.

Yes, you guess it - to bmw.de.

Only they linked it to Google.com.