How BMW's “doorway pages” scandal shows the line between SEO strategy and search manipulation.
With the increase of online marketing, SEO practices and strategies are being created at a fast pace. As a brand awareness tool, SEO and SEM are allowing companies to reach audiences online that they wouldn’t be able to normally. The goal of optimization is to gain higher search results for certain terms that are relevant to your business or site. The searches that the targeted audience uses are broken down into keywords and the closer those keywords are to the company, the better chance at gaining the audience. The methods of making a winning SEO strategy can be honest or dishonest and that is where unethical methods are formed. What is considered ethical follows the guidelines of the search engine itself and clearly visible to any visitor of the site that there is no hidden agenda. On the other hand, unethical practices are not considered illegal but are frowned upon in the marketing space. Anything seen as manipulative or as an attempt to gain higher search ranking fast, is unethical. These techniques can result in being banned or blacklisted from major search engines, which can severely damage a company’s performance online and profits.
German car manufacturer, BMW, was found to be using unethical SEO practices in order to gain higher rankings on Google. After investigation, Google found that the manufacturer was influencing search results to gain top ranking when people searched the term “used car”. The result of the investigation ended with BMW being reduced to a page rank of zero, making it impossible for the site to appear at the top. The company was found to be using “doorway pages” to boost search rankings but denied any unethical behavior in their actions. The doorway pages were made to better relate to the term used cars but redirect users to the official BMW site. The best way to succeed with SEO/SEM strategies is to be honest with your consumers and relay accurate information. Using an ethical approach is a slow and gradual process that is dependent on the search engine strategy. Google even put out a statement addressing the BMW incident, “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as ‘cloaking’,” (BBC 2006). With high levels of transparency, ethical SEO techniques are highly effective versus using trickery and false information to gain higher rankings without the possibility of being blacklisted or banned.