According to this article in Google Blogoscoped, BMW’s German site, BMW.de, got banned from Google’s search index because the webmasters of the site apparently tried to fool Google’s crawler, GoogleBot, into assigning it better relevancy than it deserves for several terms. In other words, their site detects if the visitor is GoogleBot (I’m assuming by just checking the User-Agent request header) and if it is returns a page packed with tons of keywords. If it’s a human visitor, then the normal homepage is returned.

The bottom line is, BMW.de tried to cheat, got caught, and now they pay the price: “A search for BMW Germany, which only days ago yielded BMW.de as a top result, now doesn’t show any sign of BMW.de at all.”
You can bet that some BMW IT guys over in Deustcheland are looking for a new job. =)

I found this story interesting because it was the first time I’ve heard of a major, A-list site getting the boot from Google for using shady SEO techniques.

Food for thought: Google penalizing sites that try to game it’s system does help to ensure relevant search results for users. However, by Google removing BMW.de (and other legitimate, useful sites) from their search results, does the user really win? In this example, a Googler looking for BMW’s German site will be at a loss. Ideally, Google needs to use a penalty which hurts only the website, not the user.