A couple of years ago, I remember reading a blog that reported that BMW’s german site had been banned and its PageRank reset to 0.  Google was punishing the company for exploiting its search algorithm. It was found that BMW was using a “doorway page” for many of its sites to artifically increase its ranking. A doorway page is usually a single screen filled with keywords that a crawler, such as Google’s Googlebot, can read. Often times, they also include javascript code that immediately redirects viewers to the “actual” page, but is something crawlers ignore. Google’s Matt Cutts shows what BMW was doing on his blog. BMW responded a few days later by removing the doorway pages and issuing an apology.

You can see similar exploitative techniques on youtube, where search results are driven by tag words. Often times if you look at the most viewed section of videos, you’ll find videos tagged with dozens of completely unrelated tag words. Some even go as far as editing in random screenshots into the video so that they can use it as their snapshot of the video when displayed to viewers.

The internet is the primary source of information and news to millions of people, so it should be of great concern how companies and wesbites are exploiting the page ranking algorithms of search engines. I don’t know about every else, but rarely do I ever click past the first page of results when searching through Google or any other search engine.  Am I really making my own decisions when deciding which web sites to visit or has that already been decided for me by “optimized” web sites and their marketing consultants. Exploiting search engines really takes the social aspect out of the web network. I would assume the first hit I get on a search is ranked #1 because it is popular with other people, when in reality it is just the most optimized to the search engine’s ranking conditions.