You Can’t Fool Mother Google

Pocket Lint: Google has flexed its muscles and dropped BMW Germany from its search engine following the German car manufacturer’s attempts to artificially boost its popularity ranking.
The move is likely to send shockwaves through the Internet industry over fears that one company has such power and affect over a website’s access to the public.
The delisting was reported by Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google, who works to stop websites tricking the system by featuring hidden text or different content from what the website visitor sees.
In his blog, Cutts wrote that the methods used by BMW were a violation of the search engine’s guidelines, and that a second company, camera maker ricoh.de will be removed soon for similar reasons shortly.
Moreover, bmw.com.de’s PageRank, the algorithms that assign every page on the web a sort of popularity ranking, has been reset to zero.
BMW is thought to be one of the highest profile companies to have a website blacklisted by Google.