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In 2009, Google News began reindexing and refreshing stories after they were initially indexed, to make sure to pick up on story corrections. This was a good thing.
But recently, there has been an uptick of abuse around this. One disgruntled Google News subscriber posted in the Google News Help forums that one site is refreshing their article titles several times a day in order to keep their stories up at the top of the Google News landing pages.
He wrote:
I am concerned about a recent development in Google News. As a long time reader of the science page, I have noticed that the Register is changing the titles of different articles in order to regain a front page placement.
He then documented five different title changes to a single story in a single day. All resulting in keeping the story fresh on the Google News home pages.
USA Today and BBC were accused of cheating the Google News system by spoofing the article refresh date - although Google said it was a bug.
Is this tactic a cheat or just a repercussion of continuous editing?
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
