Ricoh, the Japanese photocopier and office equipment manufacturer, is the latest business to suffer the wrath of Google, as its German subsidiary's website has suffered the internet search engine's "death penalty".

Times Online yesterday reported how bmw.de had been blacklisted by Google for attempting to fix its ranking in Google searches and potentially misleading internet users into visiting the site.

Now searches on Google for ricoh.de yield no response.

This morning, Ricoh's London office put out a statement in which the company suggested that its European operations had acted to avoid breaking Google's code of conduct: "Activities of the nature outlined in recent reports have been dealt with by Ricoh Germany, and I can confirm that all other Ricoh Europe websites comply with the regulations stipulated by Google."

Chas Moloney, Ricoh UK's marketing director, confirmed that Ricoh Germany had been running a different online marketing campaign, or search engine optimisation programme, to the rest of the company's European operations.

Google, as is its usual practice, declined to comment.

One industry expert, Warren Cowan, the chief executive of Greenlight, said of the latest bans: "Google has been heavily criticised for not cracking down on these 'black-hat' search techniques. The company is clearly sending out a strong message that it won't tolerate big brands ignoring the regulations any longer. It looks likely that more big organisations will be caught out and banned in the coming weeks."

The latest moves come at a time when Google is under pressure to revive its reputation for impartiality, and have prompted some to suggest that the search engine may be acting in a manner to seek positive publicity.

The news of the blacklisting of BMW and Ricoh was first broken on a blog run by Matt Cutts, who describes himself as a software engineer at Google. The post appeared on Saturday, at least 48 hours, BMW Germany says, after it had amended its own website in line with Google requirements.

Marc Hassinger, BMW Germany's spokesman, said, "Google has decided to spread this information which has created this media hype.

"They spread it on Saturday, a few days after the pages had been taken off. They hadn’t talked to us beforehand which we found a bit surprising." Mr Hassinger syas that less than 1 per cent of his company's website traffic comes from Google referrals, because most visitors are able to find the web address without using a search engine.

He said there had been talks between BMW and Google and that he was confident the website would soon be re-included by Google.

Read e-business consultant Chris Lake on how to avoid "death by Google" here

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