I'm always interested to watch how other people do search engine optimization (SEO). I'm even more interested to watch how the big brands go about the task because you would think that with their truck loads of cash they would be able to hire the very best SEO specialists.

Unfortunately that's not always the case and some big brands have received some very poor service from their so-called experts. Perhaps the industry that has had some of the worst advice over the years is the automotive industry and it doesn't seem to have improved much.

It was only a few years ago that BMW was caught rorting Google's webmaster guidelines with a lot of doorway pages and other associated crap. While Google's reaction might be a little different today, back then they didn't pussy-foot around. They kicked the offending site out of their listings and, if I remember correctly, it stayed out of the listings for a week or so.

So whoever gave BMW the advice that doorway pages were definitely the way to go if BMW wanted good search engine placement was definitely not the SEO expert that the company thought they were.

These days BMW seems to have learned the lesson that Google wanted to teach it and now it's Toyota's turn to make some interesting SEO decisions. They're not making the same mistake that BMW did ... they're not trying to upset Google in any way but they certainly are upsetting a whole bunch of their dealers and making some dumb decisions.

Over the years quite a few of Toyota's dealers have built a number of microsites. Some have used them for straight SEO purposes and others have used them as landing pages for their PPC campaigns and other forms of advertising. These microsites have always been in addition to the main site that each Toyota dealer has had.

Now obviously those domain names ... the ones used for the main dealer sites and the ones used for the microsites ... have incorporated the word ‘Toyota' and there has been no problem with that for years. But now Toyota is on the warpath because someone has suggested that, while the dealers' principal sites are fine, all those microsites that include the brand name are not in Toyota's best interests.

Toyota dealers who own microsites that include that dreaded word have been ordered to take down the sites and hand the domain names over to Toyota. Of course that's causing huge disruptions for dealers across the country that have been using those microsites to boost their rankings in the search engines and so boost their sales.

Toyota is also going beyond the dealer network in an effort to gain control of domains that include the word 'Toyota' in their URLs. At the moment Toyota is also targeting lead collection sites that are run by third parties and you have to wonder just how long it will be before Toyota fan groups start getting demands to surrender their domain names too.

Of course you just have to wonder who on earth has suggested that Toyota needs to control every possible domain name that contains the word 'Toyota'. Wouldn't Toyota be making more money from the sales that those dealer-owned sites are generating so why take them off line?

Many of those microsites were very geographically targeted by people who understood the local area they were targeting so wouldn't they be better placed to use those microsites to generate income for Toyota than the parent company?

And then there's the question of sub-domains run off the main dealer sites. One SEO who specializes in the automotive industry seems to think that it's only a matter of time before Toyota starts wanting those removed too.

If nothing else I guess it just goes to show that big companies are just as clueless as little ones when it comes to hiring quality SEO services and the more bullshit you can spread about your SEO abilities the more likely you are to get hired.

The need for speed
Steve showed me something rather scary this morning. He took me into our files in Google's Webmaster Tools ... opened up a few of our domains ... clicked on the Labs section and opened up the Site Performance link.

You should try it ... and while you're clicking through all those links to get to the site performance data just think about Google Caffeine and what Matt Cutts has been saying lately about loading speeds and rankings.

Now I don't know just how accurate the figures are in that part of Webmaster Tools but some of our sites are very slow to load according to Google. While a few of those sites were hosted over here in Australia ... and the relatively slow loading speed may have had something to do with where Google was measuring the loading speed from ... other slow sites were hosted on a fast server in the United States.

So go and have a look at what your loading speeds are like ... you may not care what you see.

11/21/2011 - Suck it up Princess

09/12/2011 - Bing ... it does things differently

06/15/2011 - We're Still Too Slow for Google

05/25/2011 - Wednesday Search Engine Wanderings

04/22/2011 - How Much Does it Cost You?

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