Google’s Preferred Sources Tool Is Filled With Spam

Google’s Preferred Sources tool is reportedly filled with spam and low-quality listings, raising concerns about its reliability.

Google designed its Preferred Sources tool to empower users to highlight trusted, high-quality websites for the Top News feature. Yet, the tool is currently plagued by spammy domain squatters and irrelevant sites, undermining its original purpose.

What Google’s Preferred Sources Is Supposed to Do

The Preferred Sources feature enables users to personalize which news outlets appear more frequently in Google’s Top Stories.

Instead of relying solely on Google’s algorithm, users can promote their favored sources without limiting the diversity of results.

This gives users greater control over the news they see, ideally focusing on reputable and high-quality websites.

Spammy and Similar Domain Names Flood the Tool

Unfortunately, many low-quality, spammy domains and parked websites are appearing alongside legitimate news sources.

A common tactic involves domain squatting, where bad actors register domains mimicking popular sites but with alternative top-level domains (TLDs).

For example, a well-known site ending in “.com” might be copied using domains like “.com.in” or “.net.in,” often linked to India.

Screenshot Of A Random Subdomain Ranking For Automattic

Uncertainty Surrounds How Spam Gets Into Preferred Sources

It remains unclear whether these suspicious domains are manually added by users or if Google’s system automatically indexes them.

Searches for popular SEO tools reveal genuine sites coupled with unrelated parked pages, especially in the Indian.com.in ccTLD:

Screenshot Of An Indian Parked Domain

This coincides with the tool’s availability in the USA and India, possibly explaining the regional domain presence.

Screenshot Of Indian NYTimes Parked Domain

Copycat Site on Indian Domain

A search for “Huffpost” inside the Preferred Sources tool uncovers a copycat website hosted on an Indian country-code domain.

Screenshot Of HuffPost In Source Preferences

The content focuses on payday loans, personal injury attorney services, and luxury watch retailers topics far removed from the original Huffpost brand.

Additionally, Google appears to index mostly just the homepage for these dubious sites, indicating limited content engagement.

Screenshot Of A Site Search

What’s Behind This Spam Infiltration?

There are two main possibilities:

• SEO specialists and spammers register copycat domains and submit them to Google’s Preferred Sources tool themselves
• Google’s algorithms automatically pick up and list these domains without stringent quality checks.

Both scenarios risk flooding the tool with unreliable sources, diluting its intention to highlight credible news.