Ramping up on international webspam
Remember my previous post noting that Google would be paying more attention to webspam in other countries and languages this year? This week our webspam team continued ramping up our anti-spam efforts by removing bmw.de from our index, and ricoh.de will be removed soon for similar reasons.
Context & Ripple Effects
This post turns the German BMW ban reported by Google Blogoscoped on February 4 into an official confirmation: Matt Cutts states plainly that Google's webspam team removed bmw.de from the index and that ricoh.de will follow for similar violations. The significance is as much communicative as punitive — Google's anti-spam lead is narrating an enforcement action against two major German brands within a day of outside coverage.
Cutts frames both removals inside a commitment made earlier to pay more attention to webspam in other countries and languages this year, positioning 2006 as the point where enforcement stops being perceived as an English-language-only effort.
First-order effects
- bmw.de is dropped from Google's index outright and ricoh.de is slated for the same treatment, forcing both companies' web teams to identify and remove the offending technique before they can seek reinstatement.
Second-order effects
- Other large German and European brand sites running comparable tricks now face a demonstrated willingness to delist household names, raising the expected cost of aggressive SEO across non-English markets.
Third-order effects
- If the country-and-language expansion holds, webspam enforcement becomes a communicated, globally uniform program — with Cutts' blog acting as the channel through which Google sets expectations for webmasters worldwide.
The trend: Google is extending webspam enforcement beyond English-language results and increasingly publicizing individual penalties to deter other sites.