The top story on the front page of Google News in the UK was
displaying the following snippet earlier today:
If you are a homeowner, visit the Loans4 website to see which loan you
qualify for. Compare over 30 insurers to find the cheapest car
insurance quote. …
The nature of the story meant that posting a screenshot would be in
bad taste so I’ve included a screenshot below of the result on several
other stories. You can see the issue for yourself at this link.
It seems that Google News is indexing the content of some Overture PPC
ads on the InTheNews.co.uk website. The PPC ads are directly above the
content of the story in the page code (the site positions them to the
right using CSS) so appear in the snippet of text Google uses.
Have you seen more examples of this?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This has been happening for a few months and it’s really annoying!
I’m not sure if it’s the same site I kept seeing, but it was happening pretty often. I’m surprised Google aren’t pulling most of these from RSS feeds since most news sites having them (maybe they are – maybe the ads are there too?)
Hi, I think it is an error in the way Google News parses the HTML code of the page. Perhaps is caused by the order they deliver the code, as first goes the caption, then the photo, and then not the real content or body of the news, but the ads. It could also be because they use a class called “NewsResultsControl” for news and ads
Crazy thing. Looks like Google spams itself?
this is really crazy…!!
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