What happens when Google busts you for attempting to manipulate the search engine rankings with hidden spammy keywords? Well, in Volkswagen’s case you’ll get a personal phone call from Google explaining that the practice is against the Webmaster Guidelines and that it needs to be corrected. What VW was doing was including spammy keywords in a hidden div to ensure their flash-based website still indexed well.

Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land pointed out that the VW of America site that I previously blogged about was including site keywords in an invisible div layer on site pages, which is not in keeping with Google site quality guidelines. I reached out to the technical director of VW’s creative agency and found out that they were including the keywords in this manner to increase the amount of content crawled by the Google Search Appliance for the Flash-based pages of the site. Once alerted to this, VW switched to including relevant keywords in the META data in the of the web pages on the site, an approach that is in keeping with Google quality guidelines. Thanks to Barry for pointing this out and to VW for being so responsive to the issue

Now if it was little ol’ me that did this and Google found out, you can bet the farm that all my listings in the SERPs would be gone.

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