BMW and Ricoh have had their German web pages removed from Google because they have been using deceptive means to boost ranking, according to the search engine.

The delisting was announced on a blog by Google employee Matt Cutts, who warns that Google's team will continue ramping up its anti-spam efforts.

A doorway page is full of keywords the site wants to be optimised for - however, as opposed to real pages, the doorway is only displayed to the search bot. Normal visitors are redirected to another page upon visit.

And that's what happened at BMW.de

As punishment, searching for terms like "BMW Germany" on Google will, for at least 30 days, no longer return a direct link to the car manufacturer's German website. Although some of the JavaScript redirecting pages have already been removed, Cutts demands "assurances that such pages won't reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded".

BMW refuses to comment.

Cutts said Google will be paying a lot more attention to spam in other languages, whether it be German, French, Italian, Spanish or Chinese.

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