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Google design doc: feeding WebSpam manual actions into Google News

A leaked design document proposed using Google's existing WebSpam manual-action penalties to keep sites out of the Google News corpus. The final scope covered sites penalized as blackhat spam, demoted, or hacked. It describes a spam and security process, not a political one.

Sep 15, 2017
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Whose side it served: Neither party

The document concerns spam, cloaking and hacked sites and names no political criteria.

What the record shows

SEO-Hacker's review of the leak said the document proposed that sites with WebSpam manual actions be excluded or removed from Google News. Penalties first considered included 'MobileAdRedirect,' 'ClockingRedirect' (as transcribed by SEO-Hacker), 'SpammyUserContent' and 'HackedIsolated.' The final list was narrowed to Blackhat, Demotion and Hack. Blackhat and Demotion sites would be fully removed, and hacked sites removed temporarily and restored after cleanup. Search Engine Roundtable also highlighted the web spam to News link. The September 15, 2017 date comes from the document copy supplied to this archive; the coverage found did not state it. No Google comment on this document was found.

The other side

Leak promoters presented manual actions as evidence of human intervention in news results; the document applies standard spam and hacked-site penalties that Google has publicly documented for webmasters since at least 2013.

Sources

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