Google news is broken : try kidd kraddick divorced
Seems like google news is the latest target of seo tactics. I have been aware that blogsearch was always vulnerable to spamming as it focuses too much on the title and recency. However over the last few days, I have been observing the disturbing trend of the same thing happening with google news.
People just target the keywords that are hot on google trends, write an article without much of research and try to monetize the traffic that flows in especially after integration of google news into universal search. I have been researching the trend for quite somedays now and got an awesome example today.
For some reason the keyword kidd kraddick divorced has become hot on google trends today. Searching for the keyword gets you 2 articles in the google news section. Both the articles are wirtten in a menner as if the kidd kraddick divorce happened recently. The fact is it is a pretty old news which was obvious from the wikipedia article that puts the date as April 2008 and this forum post dating back to September 2008. The 2 guys do not seem to have done even basic research as a 5 minute search got me to these articles.
May be Google needs to think hard about the quality control of the sites that it is serving up under the news section. Especially since we put a lot more trust on topics appearing under the news section.
Update1: Tarun of techbanyan seems to have done his homework better as he atleast refers to the divorce happening in April. The other site is a blatant copy paste of wikipedia site and google is serving it up under news section!!!!!!
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