Google Blacklists BMW.de

The German-car manufacturer used false pages to generate more search results.

Shame on you BMW. I thought you’d be better than this with your fine, luxury automobiles. It appears that Google has blacklisted BMW’s BMW.de website after finding out that the company used atechnique that could boost search results for the automotive maker. According to Google, BMW would make pages filled with search keywords for crawlers to find. But if a user visited that page, theywould be re-directed to another part of the site actually designed for that specific content.

“This is a violation of our Webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of ‘Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users,’” said MattCutts from Google.

BMW has already decided to clean up its act and has started removing pages containing the keywords and JavaScript code. Google says that they will re-list the site once the code that is in violationof Google’s policy is removed. But it won’t be that easy. Google wants assurance from BMW that this won’t happen again and wants to know who was responsible for the deceptive practices. BMW isn’t theonly one getting in trouble however. The German site of technology product vendor Ricoh is also due to be removed from Google “for similar reasons,” Cutts said.