Something’s rotten in Google News, or at least it sure smells that way. A recent spate of foreign, seemingly made-for-AdWords sites have been prominently appearing in Google News US. But also, the articles themselves appear to be low-quality rewrites of original stories published first in the States.

Ideally, sources appearing in Google News US are US-based sources with high authority and page rank. Not too long ago, Google tweaked its algorithm to make it more difficult for low-authority blogs and low-quality rewrite sites to make into the Google News index. Either the algorithm is not as tough on foreign sources as it is US sources, or someone’s gaming the system.

Take Playfuls.com, for instance, a Cypress-based publication. Playfuls has close to 8,000 listings in Google Entertainment News, exceeding even long established paper of record the New York Times.

Or how about Spirit India dot com, which held the top Health News spot for it’s article about the effect of dairy products on fertility, trumping nearly 300 other sources, including Fox News, Bloomberg, and Atlanta Journal Constitution. Intermixed with those sources are publications out of Belfast and even China.

So which is it? Is Google’s algorithm simply not tight enough? Or Is Google getting gamed for traffic?

The click fraud debate should get rolling again, now that Google has made a detected click fraud rate available. Danny Sullivan reported this as less than zero point zero two percent. That refers to clicks that make it past Google’s multiple layers of detection and have to be refunded to clients. The actual percentage of clicks that are detected as invalid, whether caught by Google or refunded later, is somewhere between one and nine percent. Third party companies have reported much higher rates of click fraud, which had caused a number of advertisers to question Google’s effectiveness in stopping them.

If search engines want to reject advertisements from would-be clients, a federal judge in Delaware said they are free to do so. A lawsuit filed by Christopher Langdon against Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft claimed his rights to free speech were infringed. But a U.S. District Court judge said search engines were free to reject his ads as part of their First Amendment rights. The court also found that existing communications law supported the search engines’ right to filter objectionable content. Langdon had wanted to run ads criticizing politicians in North Carolina, and the Chinese government.

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