Google has raised its mighty hand against automotive giant BMW AG by banning the bmw.de site from Google’s index. You can verify that this is indeed the case by conducting a site:bmw.de query. BMW was employing doorway pages and sneaky redirects, two no-nos mentioned in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. To add insult to injury, Google engineer Matt Cutts publicly chastized BMW on his blog.

This proves yet again that even big corporations who spend lots of money on AdWords are not immune to the ultimate penalty from Google: a total site ban.

Now let’s see if BMW heeds the warning and completely cleans up its act, removing all the spam from all its domains (such as these two pages: https://www.bmwgroup.com/spider.html and https://www.bmw-motorrad.at/at/de/sitemap-optim.html. Hat tip to Philipp Lenssen and Netprofit (the latter is in German).