"How one company games Google News"

This makes it believable that Democrats were able to game the ranking of news stories during the campaign to move up the ranking of negative stories about Republican candidates. The Daily Kos tried it here, here, and here.

Red Label News is not exactly a household name. But yesterday afternoon, it was one of the top news sources on Google News for stories about Apple's iTunes song previews.
How'd that happen? Red Label News, it appears, is a cleverly designed collection of links and headlines meant to game Google News rankings.
CNET stumbled upon Red Label News after doing one of the most basic Google searches: the vanity search. In this case, we were attempting to figure out how many news outlets were writing about Apple's decision to extend iTunes song previews to 90 seconds, news my colleague Greg Sandoval first reported in August and further revealed yesterday in a letter that was part of an effort to gain the upper hand in negotiations with small record labels.
The first Google News cluster was home to reports from some of the usual tech industry suspects: CNET, BetaNews, PC Magazine, and others grouped within the "all articles" section. But underneath that cluster was a second, more interesting grouping, comprised solely of stories from Red Label News all with slightly different headlines based around the iTunes news. . . .

UPDATE: "Google News spammer has new site, same trick"

The same company that was spamming Google news last week is back with a new site using the same techniques.
It didn't take very long for 70 Holdings--and a similar site tied to a Los Angeles-based search-engine optimization company--to start spamming Google News again.
Last week, after CNET pointed out that a company called 70 Holdings Inc. was spamming Google News under the moniker of Red Label News, Google pulled that content from its site. However, over the weekend 70 Holdings popped back up using one of the 44 domains it owns to once again flood Google News with the same type of nearly empty stories tied to search-friendly keywords and advertising. . . .