Google has made the move of blacklisting the German Web site of BMW. According to a blog posted by Google employee Matt Cutts, the move is in response to BMW allegedly trying to boost the likelihood it would be found in certain Internet searches. The Ricoh Web site has apparently suffered the same fate for similar reasons.
In the blog, Cutts alleged that BMW had violated a rule that is part of Google's webmaster quality guidelines, namely, "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users." Cutts added that although BMW had apparently removed some of the offending pages, he expected Google would require BMW submit a "reinclusion request," and that BMW would have to identify the person, or persons, responsible for creating the offending pages.
"We'll probably also need some assurances that such pages won't reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded," Cutts commented.