News.com Makes Mistake on BMW.de Blacklist
News.com is reporting on the story about bmw.de being blacklisted on Google for cloaking their website. It is nice when mainstream media start to pick up on our SEO stories, but they should check their facts before publishing their stories.
The article states that bmw.de was stuffing keywords into their website to improve their PageRank. PageRank is a measure of external popularity and can not be manipulated by on page factors. Matt Cutts discusses this issue on his blog and nowhere does he mention that they were participation in PageRank manipulation.
The articles author Tom Espiner refuses to make a correction after stating that “However, when a user visited the listed page they would be automatically redirected to another page with less text and more pictures, which was more attractive than the page the crawler saw, but would have scored lower in Google’s PageRank system.”
Clearly he does not poses the knowledge to write on such a topic.