The German website of carmaker BMW has been removed from Google search results as part of the web company's crackdown on the manipulation of its search engine.

Google confirmed yesterday BMW.de had been removed from all search results. A spokeswoman said the company could not comment on specific cases but added: "We cannot tolerate websites trying to manipulate results as we aim to provide users with the relevant and objective search results."

The website used "doorway" pages, which can manoeuvre search engines into linking to websites not directly related to the search terms by using other common terms.

BMW maintained the BMW.de doorway pages only redirected users to relevant pages.

For example, one doorway page that frequently used the German word for "used-car" redirected users to a page about BMW used-car sales. He said this was done so web users searching for a second-hand BMW car would find an index of dealerships.

"We can't see any 'manipulation' which they said was happening regarding those websites," BMW said.

Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer, wrote last month in his blog that the company planned to take a tougher line on "web spamming", such as the use of doorway pages, by non-English language websites.

On Saturday Mr Cutts wrote that BMW.de had been removed for violating the guideline: "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users."

However Mr Hassinger said the "doorway" pages had been removed last Thursday after BMW noticed criticism on some blogs.