Google is not just home to ad click fraud, it’s also open to search engine optimized fake press releases. And small business that use free or cheap press release distribution services may be the ones to pay for Google’s vulnerability. And, by the way, Will Ferrell is not dead.
Sixteen year-old blogger Tom Vendetta played a prank on Google that will end up costing PR people and SEOs. Vendetta put out a fake release saying he’d been hired by Google and within hours, his release was picked up in Google News. He says he was inspired by a post on how to spam Google News in Richard Wiggins blog.
The teenager’s experiment exposed the fact the automated system that is Google News does not verify press releases before publishing them as factual news pieces.
Says the SEO blog, “Vendetta’s fake press release has exposed a credibility problem for Google and might lead to new costs for search marketing firms that use legitimate press releases as a means of promotion.”
Here, spelling errors and all, is the fake release Vendetta posted through I-Newswire.
“(I-Newswire) – 15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page. When asked what role Vendetta will play at the Tech Giant’s offices, Page said he wouldnt have a role at the Main Offices. Instead he would work from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw’s in Google’s beta e-mail service, “Gmail”. Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student’s blog, at http://tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta’s expertise in JavaScript and AJAX.”
Google certainly will have to take steps to close gaps in its News aggregation system quickly, and it is possible that they will disempower or “delist” of free release services such as I-Newswire.com.
Says Vendetta on his blog
“Please dont [sic] tell me that I was trying to get famous or be cool, cause I wasnt. I was only trying to mess with a few minds, not a few thousand.”
The idea came from Richard Wiggins’ Wigblolg post on March 9, in which he noted,
Obviously this raises a lot of questions about what sources are indexed by Google News and whether Google News hasn’t grown way beyond the parameters of an index of bona fide media outlets.
In any event, once word gets out on this, I can imagine lots of bloggers submitting “press releases” with their daily blog entries, enhancing their visibility by spamming Google News.
Hmm… wait a minute! Now that’s an idea!
Actually, Google bots scan my blog hundreds of times every day, and I’ve often seen my posts rank high in Google search results on the day I post them. So I’m not sure frequent press releases would change much for a blog that is updated daily.
But, hey, I’ll let you know what happens to the one I just submitted through PR Web and I-Newswire, both of which claim to be indexed by Google News.
UPDATE: Another fake press release on I-Newswire, saying that actor Will Ferrell had died, made it into Google News this morning and created quite the online brouhaha. Google News has already taken down the release, but several blogs show screen shots of it in Google results earlier today.
Vendetta? LOL. Even the name is fake, I suppose:-)
Good story, BL. Nice job. And Richard Wiggins certainly did a great job of exposing the flaws.
What bothers me about this is that nonprofits, those that rely on free release services to spread their messages, will now likely be harmed by this sixteen year-old blogger. Can’t really blame him, though. He just added to Richard’s exposure of the flaws by testing the system.
Closing the holes will likely mean just closing down the indexing. It will be interesting to see if yours gets through.
Teenager foils Google News with fake press release
Google is now confronted with not just battling ad click fraud but also fake press releases. In this post at WhatsNextBlog it tells about how a teenager’s experiment exposed the fact the automated system that is Google News does not verify press…
Just because one fool peed in the beach, you do not stop taking bath in the sea. Its sad that a mad youngster misused free press release and has discredited i-newswire. Google is playing big daddy and black listing i-newswire. If the youngster had written that he was hired by Doogle Corporation in Rajasthan as Security Expert would any one have bothered to verify? If the mad cap wrote that Rajesh Bachan died dancing to a holi song in Bollywood would anyone have bothered? Today society is mature enough to know what to believe what not to believe, whom to believe and whom not to believe, when to belive and when not to beieve, where to believe and where not to believe.
Let Google and the net community wake up to realities and not talk of non existent values in journalism etc.
Two things occurred to me with this story…
The first being – I wonder whether press releases are scanned *at all* by i-newswire before they “go live”.
If not, they must outsource that job because the poor spelling should have been a red flag right away. Not to mention Will Ferrell a pretty popular celebrity in N. America, and even the simplist Google search would have revealed additional errors in the release (name of his parents, his date of birth & age, where he graduated, etc).
Also, the paragliding company mentioned in the fake release could garner some (additional) free PR of its own by issuing its own press release offering Will Ferrell free lessons. lol
Great and thoroughly research post as always, BL! :)
-Steve (the Bobblehead guy)
prbuzz.com along with prlog are not even better than i-newswire. A lots of bad distribution sites including well known prweb.com