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Google accidentally removes news publishers from Google News

It is expected that affected publishers will be reinstated by the end of the day.

Barry Schwartz on January 8, 2018 at 3:39 pm

Google has accidentally removed a number of news publishers from Google News over the past few days. Many news publishers were found complaining in the Google News forums. Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that this was accidental.

We do expect those publishers to be reinstated into Google News by the end of the day.

Maricia Scott, engineering director Google News, told us:

We apologize for the issue that resulted in a number of sites being delisted from Google News. This was an unintentional technical issue and not something we did manually. We are working hard to identify the sites that were incorrectly affected and will get them back in as soon as we possibly can.

You can check if your news site is included in Google News by conducting a site command in Google News or searching for recent story headlines in Google News. You can also check your index status in the Google News Publisher Center.

If you no longer see your news site coming up in Google News and you see a dip in traffic compared to the previous week from Google News, do not worry, Google will fix their issue, and you should show up soon.

It is unclear how many news publishers were impacted by this “unintentional technical issue.”

Postscript: News publisher have started reporting around 4:45pm EST that their sites are now back in the Google News index.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.