Google has flexed its muscles and dropped BMW Germany from its search engine following the German car manufacturer’s attempts to artificially boost its popularity ranking.

In Munich, BMW rejected Google's claims.

Google said the site had multiple references to popular search terms such as "new cars" and "used cars" embedded in its code that would artificially keep the site near the top end of search results lists on Google but would not be visible to users in their web browsers.

"This week our webspam team continued ramping up our anti-spam efforts by removing bmw.de from our index ...," said Google software engineer Matt Cutts on his website on Monday.

“Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users”, said Cutts on his blog entry.

The delisting will mean that searching for terms like "BMW" or "BMW Germany" on Google will not return a direct link to the car company's German website, bmw.de, but instead the global site.

Moreover, bmw.com.de's PageRank, the algorithms that assign every page on the web a sort of popularity ranking, has been reset to zero.

A spokesman for BMW said he was confident that www.bmw.de would be reinstated after a few days.

"Google's claim is not correct. We are not misleading our users in terms of content," he said.

These so-called black hat tactics are commonly used by gambling or pornography sites.

BMW is thought to be one of the highest profile companies to have a website blacklisted by Google.