Proving that even the big can get themselves burned badly, the brand new website of German automaker BMW has been blacklisted from the Google index for spamming.

The BMW.de site used a series of keyword laden doorway pages which, when accessed, redirected visitors to an image heavy page with less text that while more attractive to live visitors would have performed poorly in search engine listings. As any first-year SEO knows, deceptive content is the primary reason for being disincluded in the Google index.

In a posting to his blog, Google’s chief search engineer, Matt Cutts discusses the reasons behind the temporary banning and outlines the steps BMW will need to take to get its site reinstated in Google’s index. The post, “Ramping Up on International Webspam“, clearly shows two styles of pages, one delivered to Googlebot, the other shown to live visitors who where instantly redirected by the first.

“That’s a violation of our webmaster quality guidelines,” writes Cutts, “specifically the principle of, ‘Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.'”

Cutts notes that the BMW design team has taken some steps to clean up their site but as the site is so large and the technique used so often throughout, Cutts suggests a full reinclusion request that provides information on who created the doorway pages will be in order.

“It appears that at least some of the JavaScript-redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google’s webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We’ll probably also need some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded.”