BMW has been ‘banned’ from the Google search engine after the Internet giant took exception to the methods used by the car manufacturer to increase ‘hits’ on its websites.
The German brand was found to have created special pages containing nothing but popular search text. These were designed to fool Google’s search bots into placing it higher up the results in common searches. The pages in question then forwarded users on to BMW’s homepage. Google has now placed BMW’s results to zero, meaning that it does not appear in the search results.
A Google spokesman told The Times online: ‘We cannot tolerate websites trying to manipulate search results as we aim to provide users with relevant and objective search results. Google may temporarily or permanently ban any site or site authors that engage in tactics designed to distort their rankings or mislead users in order to preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results.’
BMW has already removed the pages in question and will almost certainly re-apply for inclusion in Google’s system.
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