Google Bans BMW … and Ricoh
High Google rankings can bring lots of business to a web site. As a result, it’s tempting to try to fiddle with the system. Some forms of search engine optimization are acceptable, but others aren’t. One “black hat” technique, the use of a so-called doorway page, has apparently thrown BMW’s German language web site out of Google’s results altogether. <See coverage in Forbes>
Matt Cutts, the Google engineer famous for his blog discusses this incident along with the removal of a Ricoh web site for similar transgressions.