From CNET News.com:

Google’s news service has cut ties with a press release aggregator after the partnership led Google News to link to a fake item written by a teenager who said he’d been hired by the search giant.

On March 10, Thomas Vendetta, a sophomore at Pitman High School in New Jersey, posted a fake press release to I-Newswire.com, a Web site that lets people submit press releases for distribution to online sites. The release said Vendetta had been hired by Google to work on fixing a security flaw in Gmail…

Google News picked up the item from I-Newswire that same day, and two days later news aggregator site Digg.com also linked to the item, Vendetta told CNET News.com. All three news sites moved quickly to remove the item from their pages.

And last Tuesday, I-Newswire quickly yanked from its site a release that falsely reported that actor Will Ferrell was killed in a paragliding accident. It was unknown who was responsible for that item, which also appeared on Google News, according to a screenshot posted on media watchdog Web site Regrettheerror.com.

We hope I-Newswire’s experience will teach other free online news release services, such as PR Leap and PR ZOOM, to closely monitor what they distribute. Without credibility, these services have no value.

Technorati tags: PR, Public Relations, Marketing