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:
The news folks are actually starting a nice crackdown on low-quality/spammy news sources.
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 second thread has a complaint from a smaller publisher as well. He said:
Google News team now stared its DB cleaning and most of the news websites and it is a great step by Google News team to clean spam websites.In this cleaning, many small news websites getting out from Google news on daily basis.But in this cleaning many good websites are vanishing from GNews and the main cause behind this is only a mistake did by the publishers.
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.
