Google News spammed with drug spam, dating sites & more
Beware: The Google News health section is now filled with a lot of hacked content and spam.
If you go to Google News and scroll down to the health section or click on the health section to load more health news, you may be presented with a ton of spam. It looks like Google News was injected with a ton of hacked content for pharmaceutical spam, as well as unrelated dating site spam.
Here is a screen shot of some of the articles showing up for me in the Google News health section right now:
Earlier today, this content appeared directly on the main Google News home page, but now it is only when you try to load more health news.
It is unclear if Google is aware of the spam issue and is actively cleaning it up at this point.
It is also unclear on how exactly this spam has entered into Google News. It may have been that these already approved Google News sites were hacked. So either the publisher needs to clean up the hack quickly or Google will drop them from Google News and the search index until the site is cleaned up.
Dealing with hacked content in Google is a growing issue Google is aware of.
We have emailed Google for more details on this spam attack.
Postscript: Google has confirmed the issue was on the publisher side and it appears Google has cleaned up the issue in Google News.
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In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.
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