Lisa Wang from the Google News team posted in the Google News Help forums last night that they are deprecating a bunch of publisher specific features within Google News. Some we already reported, like the Editors' Picks and standout meta tag but there are others as well.
Here is what Google is killing off:
- Editor's Picks
- Standout and original-source tags
- Ability to highlight mobile apps in the Google News Publisher Center
- News crawl error tool on Search Console
But the truth is, the last two, I still see and do not seem to be deprecated yet.
The Google News errors are showing up in Search Console for me, even updated as recently as yesterday:
The Google mobile apps in the Google News Publisher Center still shows up for me as well:
Here is Lisa Wang's full post:
With the launch of the new Google News, we re-evaluated some features, tags, and schema guidelines which were built over many years for publishers. While we are keeping and evolving certain features, we have also deprecated others.Our goal is to engage the publisher community with features that bring substantial value to both our publishers and our users. Some of the underlying ideas for these deprecated features may show up in new ways in the future.
Here is a list of the deprecated features: - Editor’s Picks - Standout and original-source tags - Ability to highlight mobile apps in the Google News Publisher Center - News crawl error tool on Search Console
There are many features we are keeping such as opinion, satire tag, etc., and there are features we are still working on which we will share in the future.
Please continue to share your thoughts with us in this forum as we are always listening to the publisher community for feedback.
Maybe these will all go away soon but who knows...
Forum discussion at Google News Help and Twitter.
