Originally published February 23 2006
Google removes BMW's German website from its index
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Google's Matt Cutts first reported the removal of BMW's German site in his blog. He said BMW's German website would show up one way when the search engine visited the page but when a user opened it, a completely different page showed up.
Google has removed BMW's German website from its index for violating Google's guidelines against trying to manipulate search results.
The move was first reported by Google's Matt Cutts in a posting to his blog.
He said BMW's German website had been removed last week because certain pages on the site would show up one way when the search engine visited the page but when a web user opened the page, a redirect mechanism would display a completely different page.
Cutts wrote that the practice violates Google's guidelines, particularly the principle that states: "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users."
Google's guidelines also specifically include an item that recommends that website creators don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Cutts' blog posting also said that Ricoh's German website would be removed from Google's index soon for similar reasons.
In mid-January, Cutts wrote in his blog that he was offering a courtesy notice to designers of non-English language sites that starting in 2006 Google would be paying closer attention to tricks that go against Google's guidelines.
A Google spokesperson confirmed via e-mail that the BMW site has been removed but would not comment further on the specific case, adding that Google cannot tolerate sites that try to manipulate search results.
Cutts wrote that he expects that Google's spam team will require a re-inclusion request including details on who created the misleading pages before BMW.de is included in the database again.
Removing BMW.de from the Google database sets a high-profile example because BMW's website practices have been discussed online for years, said Hellen Omwando, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.
Part of the problem that Google faces, however, is that there's a fine line between site optimisation and tricky practices that manipulate results, Omwando said.
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