San Francisco, February 8:

Internet search leader Google has blacklisted BMW’s main German website because the luxury car maker used a banned technique to artificially boost its search engine rating, says technology website ZDNet.

The report quoted a blog from a Google software engineer who said the search giant had

removed BMW’s German site (www.BMW.de) from its Web index because it was engineered to appear differently to Google’s automated webcrawler than it did to users.

The trick involved using a page crammed with lots of keywords. But when users

clicked on the page they were automatically redirected to a different web-page with less text and more pictures. “This is 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’,” said the blog.

The report outlined the technical steps that BMW will need to take to get the page included in Google’s index but noted that the company’s other web pages remain unaffected, according to the technology website ZDNet.