14 DAY TRIAL // Search Engine Land reported today that one of the best known online publications, the New York Times, is spamming Google with sex content. It seems that the spam results are displayed when any user searches the Internet for the "sex" keyword, the newspaper being placed on the third position with its internal results. Yep, you read it correctly; The New York Times is indexed by Google with its internal results. If you didn't find out by now and you're asking yourself why I'm so surprised, you should know that Google strictly prohibits the index of the internal results. Generally, these results are the websites returned by the internal search engine, making Google return the search results provided by other technology.
"Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines," Google sustains in its guidelines. However, The New York Times infringed this rule and indexed its results on Google, being one of the first websites displayed for the "sex" keyword.
"Today, there's some buzz that one of the top listings for a search for sex on Google turns out to be an internal search results page from the New York Times," Danny Sullivan sustained for Search Engine Land. "So is it spamming? Yep," he concluded.
Now, there only one problem. Since the search giant Google advised users to avoid indexing their own search results because the guidelines were improved with this rule, it's not quite clear if this problem appeared after the modification. The result might be a little bit older so the publication isn't responsible for the spam. However, it seems that the entry was already deleted as the results do not appear on the Google SERP anymore.