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February 7, 2006 – Camera, printer and photocopier manufacturer Ricoh has been blacklisted from Google, the search engine super giant, according to a Google employee’s blog and leading news wires.
Google retains the right to "eliminate" companies from their index, if they feel that the company is inappropriately manipulating the search engine for increased hits and higher rankings. Ricoh Germany and BMW Germany were both accused of such instigation and removed from Google Germany’s engine.
Leading news wires have reported, however, that Ricoh Germany has announced an intention to comply with Google standards in order to become reinstated.
There is no news yet on whether or not Ricoh has officially applied for a "reinclusion request", an action required by Google protocol which banned companies must complete before they can be re-indexed.
As many websites now tailor their design towards better visibility by Google search spiders, the targets of Ricoh and BMW seems strange to many leading analysts. Google, Ricoh, and BMW have not explicitly revealed the exact nature of the manipulation that has landed the latter two companies in such trouble.