Google penalizes websites that violate its guidelines against manipulative practices like cloaking, doorway pages, and buying/selling links. Some major brands that received penalties include BMW for using doorway pages in 2006, WordPress for hidden links in 2005, and the Washington Post and other news sites for selling links, though they did not lose overall search rankings. Expedia is also suspected of a penalty for paid links, though Google did not confirm. Even Google is not immune, having received penalties on its own sites in Japan for spammy promoted widgets and on YouTube and Maps algorithms. Penalties are an imperfect system, but aim to discourage manipulation of search results.

1. Top Brands that received a Google Penalty! SEO Epic Fails
February 4, 2021 / Digital Marketing / Google Penalty
Table of Contents
Companies that tried to cheat Google and lost
What is a Google Penalty? Manual & Algorithmic
1. The Day when BMW received a Google Penalty
2. WordPress – DoorWay Spam
3. Expedia – Unconfirmed Google Penalty
4. The Washington Post – Google Penalty
5. Google Penalizing itself!
Companies that tried to cheat Google and lost
Top Brands that received a Google Penalty
What is a Google Penalty? Manual & Algorithmic
Google is well known for giving penalties to websites that violate its Webmaster Guidelines,
SEO’s call it the white hat practices where you follow Google’s guidelines literally, not
buying/selling links even that everyone else is doing that, some big brands were caught red-
handed and received a Manual Penalty, Where an actual Google employee investigate the link
profile and eliminate it from Google’s index so it doesn’t show in search results.
If a Google Reviewer decided that you are manipulating search results to generate “Free Traffic”
your website is doomed, it might take years to recover.
Algorithmic Penalties, on the other hand, are more common, and somehow easier to recover,
unless it’s a core update and your site was hit – without showing in Googe Search Console –
then you should probably do the fixes and wait for the next core update.
Penalties are indeed not a perfect system yet if you think your site is penalized connect with our
SEO experts to help you recover.
BMW Googl penalty
1. The Day when BMW received a Google Penalty
No brand is immune from Google Penalties! and BMW learned that the hard way.
Back in 2006, BMW was accused of setting up “Doorway” pages and cloaking their content.

2. In simpler terms, they were showing Google bots pages that have the word “Used Cars”
repeated 40 times, while showing users normal pages.
Back then, this tactic will affect the page’s relevancy and boost its page rank for this money
generating search term.
Therefore, bmw.com.de’s precious PageRank has been reset to zero, and direct or branded
searches for “BMW” were not returning direct results to BMW.com.de! The penalty remained for
3 days only, but it was a sales & branding catastrophe.
Matt Cuts, Google’s spokesperson has confirmed the penalty, and also accused Ricoh the
Japanese Office machines manufacturer of the same act in a blog post. Nowadays Google is
not open regarding manual action like it used to be during Matt Cuts Era.
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2. WordPress - DoorWay Spam
The most used Content Management System around the world, and despite being Google’s
favored website builder, was far from safety.
Back when it started in 2005, WordPress hosted pages for a third-party company, and it
included hidden links passing “link Juice” and authority to affect rankings.
WordPress domain is high authoritative site and it worked for a couple of weeks, but the link
velocity was too high that it was obvious they are sending links to their money-generating pages
to increase their Authority.
If more people – other web pages- are talking about your brand, that’s an important ranking
factor, but it’s supposed to come naturally as you produce “Great Content” not intentionally
paying websites for placing your links.
But Fairly immediately, WordPress stated that it was a badly implemented experiment in
advertising and apologized.
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3. 3. Expedia - Unconfirmed Google Penalty
This is not a confirmed Penalty but it’s well known and Google does not confirm or deny
penalties like it used to.
However, it’s suspected that Expedia was involved in paid links – Everyone is, We are –
therefore received a penalty one some pages for few terms, the branded searches were leading
to the domain, but Expedia was excluded from other hotels related terms, Search Engine
Journal covered the story in Depth.
It’s worth mentioning that Google is pushing into the hotels business with its Google Maps
searches, currently, directory websites and Expedia included are being pushed down the
organic results in the favor of Google local pack listings.
Washinghton Post google Penalty
4. The Washington Post - Google Penalty
News websites are a great link-asset to get valuable links with traffic to your site, let’s face it,
Google created the link-buying industry, and while news publishers are suffering from the rise of
blogging websites and social media, few advertisers are relying on Tier1 news websites for their
ads.
So selling links is the kinda reasonable business model for publishers to stay in business, but
it’s against Google guidelines, therefore The Washington Post, Forbes and other esteemed
news portal received their share of penalties.
That was in 2007, but the rules standstill, it’s worth mentioning that, unlike other Penalties,
these sites generally didn’t lose rankings in Google, though Google reserved the right to do that.
IE, you could still find their home pages and much of their content in Google searches, but their
external links are attributed no-follow.
Many SEO’s are paying thousands of dollars for links that bring no value, as Google is ignoring
the referring domain due to link scheme, but it’s impossible to measure a link value so
publishers will keep on selling, its a hidden chaos!
Keywords for Arabic SEO
5. Google Penalizing itself!
It’s no wonder with all algorithmic penalties running inside google search, Google Japan was
penalized for spammy links to widget it was trying to promote in Japan.
Youtube received some auto actions during the years, lastly in 2020 after Twitter incident,
where many twitter results were removed from search results.
The majority of the automatic penalties are occurring on Maps, penalizing legit Mam and Paps
stores to fight spam algorithmically.

4. But in the end, no one complains about Google except SEOs! it’s a messy fun world we work at!