Well, Matt Cutts, has announced to the SEM/SEO world that Google is going to start cracking down on foreign language spam.

He announced in his blog that www.bmw.de has been removed from their index for serving up different content to the spider from the content that is served up to the surfer. There is a screen shot of this in his posting.

This is fairly significant and really speaks to how Google views the world. You see it is OK to hate Google and tell the world about it. Google will be happy to put you in their index providing you don’t spam. Think I’m joking - no, I am not - check out this post from Matt. Look for the ‘f’ word.

Don’t get me wrong I understand why Google de-listed bmw.de - but who will this look worse for? BMW or Google. Well, I can guarantee there are some people over at BMW saying “I told you so.” You see, image is hugely important companies like BMW. So every piece of screen real estate goes towards that image. They don’t want to give any of that space to SEO. Yet, the higher ups will get annoyed they don’t show up for some KWs… so they put the pressure on the lower downs… and presto you’ve got the spam Matt pointed out. BTW - you could serve up the home page in flash and redirect anything without a flash browser to a non-flash version of the page. AFAIK this is safe thing to do.

So the question - who does this affect? Google or BMW? Would a user of Google looking for car information from BMW in Germany be seriously confused if Google didn’t return any results from bmw.de? Likely they would. You see - there is a certain expectation of all sites to be in the index. And it is 100% expected for important large sites to be in. Take the whitehouse.gov. Could you imagine if they spammed and Google delisted them? What would happen if someone arrived at whitehouse.gov and then did a site search for George Bush from the tool bar? Would the user go “ah, naughty whitehouse, they must’ve been spamming and got the boot!” Um, not likely unless they are an SEO. They would assume Google was messed up.

And so too might someone think Google was messed up if someone does a site search for BMW at bmw.de (right now there are no results).

Um, Google are you messed up?