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BMW.de. Ricoh.de back in Google index

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
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Elinor Mills

The German language Web sites of carmaker BMW and technology product vendor Ricoh are back in the search results on Google's search site after they stopped using a technique designed to artificially boost their search engine rating, according to a Google engineer.

Google blacklisted BMW.de earlier this week after the carmaker violated Google's guidelines by including "doorway pages" that would automatically redirect visitors to a different URL. That Web page was more attractive than the page the crawler saw, but would have scored lower in Google's PageRank system. At the time, Google said it was also planning to blacklist Ricoh.de.

"I appreciate BMW's quick response on removing JavaScript-redirecting pages from BMW properties," Cutts wrote in his blog on Tuesday. "The webspam team at Google has been in contact with BMW, and Google has reincluded bmw.de in our index. Likewise, ricoh.de has also removed similar doorway pages and has been reincluded in Google's index."

Google will be expanding its efforts to fight Webspam in none-English languages this year, he added.