Google News spammed with drug spam, dating sites & more

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.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.