Some PR people love Google News because it often distributes their press releases as if they are real news articles written by independent journalists.

"This gets past the gate-keepers!" has been their gleeful mantra. However, studies have shown that nearly one in five people can confuse press releases with real news stories.

That's all the better if you want a press release to pull the wool over people's eyes. But it's not ethical. And it is not a good thing for society because we need to be clear about what is paid-for-content, what is advertising, and what is not.

New rules about site maps published by Google news state that publishers should use the tag to label their content:

The tag takes one or more of the following values, separated by commas:
- PressRelease (visible): an official press release.
- Satire (visible): an article which ridicules its subject for didactic purposes.
- Blog (visible): any article published on a blog, or in a blog format.
- OpEd : an opinion-based article which comes specifically from the Op-Ed section of your site.
- Opinion : any other opinion-based article not appearing on an Op-Ed page, i.e., reviews, interviews, etc.
- UserGenerated : newsworthy user-generated content which has already gone through a formal editorial review process on your site.

This needs to be done "because these properties can directly affect the experience of a user, it is essential to accurately characterize your articles in Google News."

I've advocated the clear labeling of online PR content for several years so I'm glad that Google agrees.