Comments on: Google Features Volkswagen, Which Happens To Be Search Spamming

By: seekXL

seekXL — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:14:18 +0000

a good new design, but the tagcloud never change? static tagcloud?

By: CVOS

CVOS — Sat, 05 May 2007 01:04:38 +0000

It looks like VW is quite embarassed over this. Did they hire a shady SEO firm or was hidden text the brilliant idea of the VP of marketing?

Either way, you can see the old cached version here (it wont last long):
vw cached spam

the current page disallows caching. This will be interesting: VW doesn’t want search engines to cache its pages? They go from spamming for dollars to blocking indexing spiders?

their code:
meta http-equiv=”Pragma” content=”no-cache”

By: savage

savage — Fri, 04 May 2007 17:27:42 +0000

ceggi, yes they took it down already. read all comments before leaving your own.

“In fairness to Google, you cannot expect them to check every site before they will except ad or partnership dollars?”

i thought google’s core function was “checking sites” ?? a company who is going to “organize the world’s information” should be able to handle “checking every website” right?

By: ceggi

ceggi — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:22:34 +0000

Re-posting my question since it came out wrong–sorry for the duplication.

I’d like to know how to view the div we’re talking about in the source code. I can see the “invisibleContent” class in the CSS, but not the div that contains the invisible text. I’m using “View Source” in the Firefox browser. Do I need a different tool to see the div? Or has VW already removed it?

Thanks!

By: ceggi

ceggi — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:04:01 +0000

Hi,

I can’t see the with the class “invisibleContent” in the VW source code. I’m on http://www.vw.com and viewing the “Page Source” using Firefox. When I look at the CSS file http://www.vw.com/global/css/html_default_v2.css, I do see the “invisibleContent” tag, but I’d like to know how to see the we’re talking about in the source code as well. . .

Can you let me know what I’m missing?

Thanks!

By: follett

follett — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:40:31 +0000

Just one small point -
The Car Geek….
I read your comments above (and of course noted the nifty little link that you have added in your post)
Thanks for the 3x spam comments which you tried to add to my blog this am.
It’s getting a little tiresome…

///
I think I already visited that site and it was a really cool site… Changing, adding, replacing your choosen VW aftermarket part and automatically computes for the cost of the VW was the coolest part of that site.. I did not noticed that they already broke some rules of the Google which regards in using html codes…
///

By: Eugeniu

Eugeniu — Fri, 04 May 2007 10:08:50 +0000

Why do they hide content , there is a “legal” way to hide it . They can just place a small button and onclick will show the content :)

By: Philipp Lenssen

Philipp Lenssen — Fri, 04 May 2007 09:23:39 +0000

Google pinged them and VW quickly changed it: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2007/05/vw-website-updates.html Question: Does Google reach out to all sites with hidden text before they ban them, or just to big ones?

By: Neuro

Neuro — Fri, 04 May 2007 09:17:14 +0000

Odd

It would be ok if they where sniffing the flash and displaying text to a non flash browser.

VW do seem to have a habbit of breaking the rules.

Though I wonder if its a lame atempt to handle nonflash browsers.

What is it with car manafacturuers and flash what does say ttremastered do for audi’s brand.

By: seoimage

seoimage — Fri, 04 May 2007 05:31:31 +0000

In fairness to Google, you cannot expect them to check every site before they will except ad or partnership dollars? Perhaps the Googlers like their VWs but not their BMWs? :)