FRANKFURT: Internet search giant Google said on Monday it had removed the German website of German auto maker BMW,
www.bmw.de, from its search index after it allegedly discovered attempts to artificially boost the popularity ranking of the site on Google's search engine.
In Munich, BMW rejected Google's claims.
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 website.
"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.
A spokesman for BMW said he was confident that
www.bmw.de would be reinstated after a few days.
"Google's claim is not correct. We are not misleading our users in terms of content," he said.
