I thought the same thing...one big business outing another in public...just seems weird. That said though, Matt and Google can ban any of of my sites anytime if he writes about it in his blog. BMW is the clear winner here. Only out of the index for a couple days and during that time I'm sure they got plently of traffic from all the people who were writing about it.
I don't know where i read this (probably Matt's blog), but someone said this would hurt BMW image more, than it will help with their damn traffic I agree.
Bmw is back, but the others private sites which were banned in germany are not back They must wait 2 years maybe.
Survey 5,000 people who are not webmaster/search marketers and ask them what they think about BMW cloaking. You'll get 5,000 blank looks as replies I don't think it any negative impact on BMW, outside of the webmaster community, at all.
My opinion is this : ask 5000 people about "website" and they will look blank SO looking back, the webmaster community is really big these days Btw, BMW is back (please notice the cache page fast, because after 1-2 seconds, it gets redirected to the new NON-spam BMW page.) spamming, after two days of exclusion. All the BMW positions in google, are also back, with all the SPAMMY url's they had before
Most non-webmasters would consider cloaking a "why not try what it takes to get to the top" method that there is nothing wrong with. Once they understand a little bit more, that's when many start having a problem it.