CYBERSPACE – The numerous adult webmasters banned from search giant Google’s index over the years for “spamming” the engine now have some high profile mainstream company: over the weekend, Google banned the German branches of both carmaker BMW and leading supplier of office machinery Ricoh.Both sites were banned for a reason that will ring familiar to many in the adult sector; the sites had multiple references to popular search terms relevant to their products imbedded in the code of their sites, designed to attract Google’s spider, but not visible to users of the sites.

“That’s 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,’” Google software engineer Matt Cutts posted on his website.

BMW denied that they are engaging in misleading practices, or spamming the popular index with pages engineered to trick the Google spider.

“Google’s claim is not correct. We are not misleading our users in terms of content,” a company spokesperson said this week in Munich.

For its part, Ricoh is being more conciliatory, and admitted that there have been some “issues” with the website for Ricoh Germany.

“Other Ricoh websites in the European region comply with the regulations as stipulated by Google,” a spokesperson for Ricoh said. “Meanwhile, Ricoh Germany has looked into the Google standard and has every intention of complying shortly.”

Neither BMW nor Ricoh has been permanently banned, and most analysts agree that their sites will be reinserted into Google’s index shortly, once they have demonstrated renewed compliance with Google’s policies.