All About Content

It has recently come to the public’s attention that it’s possible to publish “fake news” and have Google News index and display it — even if the fake news is about Google itself. To which I say… yeah, duh!

ZDNet reports that the press release, written by a high-school sophomore, claims the author was hired by Google to work on a Gmail security flaw. Google’s response was to set up a college fund for the kid. Actually, not really, I’m just kidding. It was the fake press release that attributed this quote to Google CEO Larry Page: “The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education.” To repeat: this kid does not work for Google, never has.

While some reports make it appear that Google has cut all relationships with i-Newswire as a result, it’s more likely that Google News specifically is no longer accepting automated i-Newswire feeds. The site is not banned in the main Google index. i-Newswire is tightening up its editorial standards, and I imagine they’ll be back in the news index eventually.

There are a variety of services that allow you to send press releases for free and even the paid services cost as little as $10 per release, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that people abuse them. This has been going on for a while, actually. What’s different this time is that Google was the subject of the press release, and to paraphrase: “If it bleeds (or it’s about Google), it leads.”

(For what it’s worth, I’ve tested quite a few of these services, including i-Newswire, and PRWeb is the one I like best. PRWeb also just entered a partnership with Topix.net, another very popular news aggregation site, so this is probably one of the more valuable wires to submit to for SEO purposes.)

Once Google News has your release indexed, it’ll show up in news search based on the time stamp. Yahoo News usually includes this type of content in its “blog search” results but in a separate section to the right of the screen, reserving the main results section for a (loosely) pre-qualified set of sources.

That’s why Yahoo News has always been the far superior service for news aggregation. The aspect that makes Yahoo so vexing from a regular search engine perspective — that listings are heavily determined by human editors, not algorithms — makes Yahoo News not just more credible, but (usually) also more interesting.

Google maintains the advantage of timeliness though. A search this morning on “Google News prank” pulls up much better results in Google.com and Google News than it does in Yahoo News.