Google Removes BMW's German Web Site From Search Index

Google said the site had multiple references to popular search terms such as "new cars" and "used cars" embedded in its code that would artificially keep the site near the top end of search results lists on Google but would not be visible to users in their web browsers.

"This week our Webspam team continued ramping up our anti-spam efforts by removing bmw.de from our index ...," said Google software engineer Matt Cutts on his Web site.

"That's 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'," Cutts said.

In Munich, BMW rejected Google's claims. "Google's claim is not correct. We are not misleading our users in terms of content," a company spokesman said.

He said was confident that www.bmw.de would be reinstated in a few days.