Typically you do not want Google News to index and rank sponsored (paid for) content in the news results. But sites like USA Today, The Washington Post and many others simply cannot get their sponsored content out of Google News even if they tried.
A Google News Help thread has one of the individuals at the company asking about why they cannot remove the content from Google News.
The publisher has tried forcing Google to stop indexing and ranking the news content in Google News by using robots.txt directives and also using the meta robots attribute on the page itself. But even so, sponsored content is being ranked in Google News by Google.
Here is the most recent listing of sponsored content in Google News:
Even the top contributor in the help forum, Robert Gunnells said it is confusing and he is trying to get someone from Google to give him a direct answer on this. That was about two weeks ago and USA Today and The Washington Post is still having issues.
Robert wrote back then:
Nope, nothing back from Google News and the sponsored content is still in Google News.
Trust me, Google doesn’t want this content in the Google News index either. So I am surprised this is still going on, even with big brand publishers.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
