'Cyber Monday Spammer' hits Google News Search Results

If you've done some searching for "cyber monday", "cyber monday deals", or other Cyber Monday search terms on Google, you have probably came across some search results that looked like this:







The links underlined in red are spam sites designed to rank at the top of search engine results for key search terms. The spammer will make earnings off of the spam by placing google adsense ads and Amazon affiliate ads which pay per click and per action.

What makes the spam unique in this case, is that the offending websites have been approved to be a Google News Publisher. This is not easily done, because to be a Google News Publisher, you need to pass (what I thought was) stringent guidelines set forth by Google.

The bulk of the "spam" I've seen over the past 7 days is from:

Healthnewsca.com
Stopwatchnews.com
ifridaynews.com
Businessnewstrends.com
healthbeautynews.com
gadgetglass.com
tgifridaynews.com

Those sites have been publishing non-sense articles upwards of up to 25 per hour on average, and upwards of 200 articles during peak times.

A whois on the owner of those domains belongs to 70 Holdings. Cnet published an article on 70 Holdings back in early November, so apparently this isn't the first time they've targeted holidays or events related web traffic.

With Cyber Monday spam from the above mentioned sites occuring for over a week now, one has to wonder why Google News has not banned those sites from their program. It's also surprising that other news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Huffington Post whose news articles usually rank atop news search results, have not done a single story on the Google News spammer.

In this author's amateur estimation, the Cyber Monday Spammer will probably steal over 400,000 Cyber Monday searches from popular news orginization...and furthermore the spammer will potentially earn over $100,000 in Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliate earnings.