Over the past few weeks, I have seen an influx of both complaints about Google News Spam and publishers being dropped out of the Google News index. I honestly felt they went hand in hand.

I’ll point out two threads at Google News Help Forums. The first mentions a tweet by Googler Matt Cutts who said:

People have been asking for Google News to step up on their spam detection and they are still asking for it today. I’ve complained about it a couple times this year, see Google News Quality Post: Spam Getting Worse.

But with any increase in spam detection and spam removal techniques, there are some who are collateral damage. The second thread has a complaint from a smaller publisher as well. He said:

I don’t think anything immediate will happen with this. They will probably use all this feedback to continually tweak the algorithms and spam detection techniques but this is the nature of the beast – from what I understand.

Forum discussion at Google News Help Forums.