Press Release Spam Make Google News Look Like Dumb Internet Man

EricMack 0 668 Views

Today on Google News' Top Stories front page you could find plenty of coverage of the ruling allowing the "jailbreaking" of iPhones as well as some discussion of the soon to be released update of the Android operating system and continued skepticism about Microsoft's upcoming Phone 7. Just above most of these headlines was a link to Google News' Mobile Technology "section," a new feature and a slight alteration to the way Google News' algorithms organize its thousands of headline links into something useful.

Clicking over to the front of the Mobile Technology section , however, brought to light the shortcomings of Google's insistence on the ability of lines of code to do a better job at curating news than actual human beings.

In the lead spot of the section were a handful of colorful headlines including: "Cheap mobile phone deal, Go crazy" and an invitation to click through and see the 179 similar "news" stories. Only a fool refuses such an invitation, and following the link did indeed transport me to one of the best spammy, not-written-by-a-native-English-speaker press release parties ever, featuring such headline gems as "Cheap iPhone deals,celestial feeling." or the strangely suggestive "Blackberry 8520 Curve deals-Easy to fill your pocket."

Perhaps Google's algorithms include code that assign a higher relevance score to anything with a "celestial feeling?" Or maybe it's the fact that the source of the poorly written releases (If yu make any cheap iPhone deal you are surely embracing the most profitable deal. Apple iPhone deals also lead you to free gifts.), FPRD (for Free Press Release Distribution) has managed to game Google News through the sheer volume of releases it sends out. Still, we can't blame it all on the code. After all, while Google doesn't have an army of editors picking and placing news stories on its front pages like Yahoo or AOL, it does have human beings who vet and approve news sources before putting them into the rotation and slap them with a category like "press release," "blog," or "satire".

So at some point, someone in Mountain View pointed a browser at FPRD, saw headlines on the front page like Samsung Tocco Lite Waiting to Fill Joy in Your Life and thought it to be content worthy and relevant to users somewhere, maybe.

In Google's defense, perhaps we should give them a while to work out the kinks in the new sections feature, and within twenty minutes, the spam headlines had completely disappeared from the Mobile Technology page.

But now comes the real test - seeing how Google interprets the headline on this story. Do they have an algorithm for irony yet?

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This thread captured the exact problem: algorithmic news curation can briefly surface high-volume, low-quality press-release farms that look like real coverage. ’s observation (and the quick disappearance of those links) shows two things: Google’s systems surface what they crawl, and publisher/source controls and policy changes are the primary way to stop repeat occurrences. ()

Practical steps for publishers who want to avoid being treated as part of a “press‑release network” or for original publishers whose work is being republished elsewhere: 1) stop mass duplication — publish the canonical version on the owned site; 2) for syndicated copies, add a rel="canonical" to the original or block indexing of the republished copy; and 3) explicitly block Google News or Googlebot‑News from sections you don’t want crawled using robots.txt or page meta tags. Example snippets (use only on the pages/paths you want excluded): 

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /press-releases/

<meta name="Googlebot-News" content="noindex, nofollow">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/original-article">

These are the exact controls Google documents for publishers who need to restrict News indexing. ()

For press teams and SEOs: distribution through wire services can get content into Google’s crawl path (as noted), but treating press releases like link farms or stuffing keyword‑heavy anchor text invites demotion or blocking. Invest instead in clear bylines, correct structured data (datePublished/dateModified, headline, author), unique angles, and a newsroom page with stable URLs and a News sitemap — exactly the signals Google News recommends. ()

If the problem is seen from the reader side, Google has added user controls to reduce “blogs/press release” noise and Publisher Center controls have evolved (Google has moved toward automated publisher pages), so persistent issues are now addressed both by user settings and publisher-side blocking — which is why some posters here expected Google to fix it. (seroundtable.com)

Summary: algorithmic errors happen; the effective fix is hygiene at the source (canonicalization, noindex/meta, limit syndication) plus following Google News publisher best practices so original reporting is the version Google surfaces.

Member Avatar for facebookguru01
facebookguru01 -2 Newbie Poster

well that is nothing that much worry to google.They will find their way on.

Member Avatar for seoexpertsubash
seoexpertsubash 0 Newbie Poster

Google plays a major role, so through google it is very easy to get traffic to your main site. Also if we are creating a press news for our site and promoting that PR in lot of press releasing sites, we can get placed in Google.

Today on Google News' Top Stories front page you could find plenty of coverage of the ruling allowing the "jailbreaking" of iPhones as well as some discussion of the soon to be released update of the Android operating system and continued skepticism about Microsoft's upcoming Phone 7. Just above most of these headlines was a link to Google News' Mobile Technology "section," a new feature and a slight alteration to the way Google News' algorithms organize its thousands of headline links into something useful.

Clicking over to the front of the Mobile Technology section , however, brought to light the shortcomings of Google's insistence on the ability of lines of code to do a better job at curating news than actual human beings.

In the lead spot of the section were a handful of colorful headlines including: "Cheap mobile phone deal, Go crazy" and an invitation to click through and see the 179 similar "news" stories. Only a fool refuses such an invitation, and following the link did indeed transport me to one of the best spammy, not-written-by-a-native-English-speaker press release parties ever, featuring such headline gems as "Cheap iPhone deals,celestial feeling." or the strangely suggestive "Blackberry 8520 Curve deals-Easy to fill your pocket."

Perhaps Google's algorithms include code that assign a higher relevance score to anything with a "celestial feeling?" Or maybe it's the fact that the source of the poorly written releases (If yu make any cheap iPhone deal you are surely embracing the most profitable deal. Apple iPhone deals also lead you to free gifts.), FPRD (for Free Press Release Distribution) has managed to game Google News through the sheer volume of releases it sends out. Still, we can't blame it all on the code. After all, while Google doesn't have an army of editors picking and placing news stories on its front pages like Yahoo or AOL, it does have human beings who vet and approve news sources before putting them into the rotation and slap them with a category like "press release," "blog," or "satire".

So at some point, someone in Mountain View pointed a browser at FPRD, saw headlines on the front page like Samsung Tocco Lite Waiting to Fill Joy in Your Life and thought it to be content worthy and relevant to users somewhere, maybe.

In Google's defense, perhaps we should give them a while to work out the kinks in the new sections feature, and within twenty minutes, the spam headlines had completely disappeared from the Mobile Technology page.

But now comes the real test - seeing how Google interprets the headline on this story. Do they have an algorithm for irony yet?

Member Avatar for ADRIANEra
ADRIANEra -15 Junior Poster in Training

they will find their way ..and solved this problem ..Google have the solution of all problems

Member Avatar for ChristinaJomes
ChristinaJomes -9 Newbie Poster

I don't heard anything like this...

Today on Google News' Top Stories front page you could find plenty of coverage of the ruling allowing the "jailbreaking" of iPhones as well as some discussion of the soon to be released update of the Android operating system and continued skepticism about Microsoft's upcoming Phone 7. Just above most of these headlines was a link to Google News' Mobile Technology "section," a new feature and a slight alteration to the way Google News' algorithms organize its thousands of headline links into something useful.

Clicking over to the front of the Mobile Technology section , however, brought to light the shortcomings of Google's insistence on the ability of lines of code to do a better job at curating news than actual human beings.

In the lead spot of the section were a handful of colorful headlines including: "Cheap mobile phone deal, Go crazy" and an invitation to click through and see the 179 similar "news" stories. Only a fool refuses such an invitation, and following the link did indeed transport me to one of the best spammy, not-written-by-a-native-English-speaker press release parties ever, featuring such headline gems as "Cheap iPhone deals,celestial feeling." or the strangely suggestive "Blackberry 8520 Curve deals-Easy to fill your pocket."

Perhaps Google's algorithms include code that assign a higher relevance score to anything with a "celestial feeling?" Or maybe it's the fact that the source of the poorly written releases (If yu make any cheap iPhone deal you are surely embracing the most profitable deal. Apple iPhone deals also lead you to free gifts.), FPRD (for Free Press Release Distribution) has managed to game Google News through the sheer volume of releases it sends out. Still, we can't blame it all on the code. After all, while Google doesn't have an army of editors picking and placing news stories on its front pages like Yahoo or AOL, it does have human beings who vet and approve news sources before putting them into the rotation and slap them with a category like "press release," "blog," or "satire".

So at some point, someone in Mountain View pointed a browser at FPRD, saw headlines on the front page like Samsung Tocco Lite Waiting to Fill Joy in Your Life and thought it to be content worthy and relevant to users somewhere, maybe.

In Google's defense, perhaps we should give them a while to work out the kinks in the new sections feature, and within twenty minutes, the spam headlines had completely disappeared from the Mobile Technology page.

But now comes the real test - seeing how Google interprets the headline on this story. Do they have an algorithm for irony yet?

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