We knew Google would stop accepting publications into Google News Publisher Center, but Google also stopped showing news "sources" in Google News yesterday, stopped showing a follower count for those sources, and access to Publisher Center features to news organizations was not working. This seemed to be a bug that Google fixed this morning and all is working now.
Here is what happened yesterday.
In April, Google said "publishers can no longer add publications to the Publisher Center." Google added that they are "making this change as part of a transition to roll out automatically created publication pages later this year."
Yesterday when I went to the Google Publisher Center - I was no longer able see much of anything:
Plus, when I search in the Google News box for this site, it use to show "source":
It did not work:
Valentin Pletzer noticed this change last night and posted on X saying, "Looks to me like Google removed self-managed publications. I have no more sources I follow in my accounts. I can add new ones but those look like generated ones."
He shared this screenshot:
I still have access to the direct source URL in Google News for this site, it is over here - I was wodnering if that might go away soon?
As Valentin noted, the "new thing is that now existing publications are vanishing (for publishers and users) and only the automatically generated ones can be found."
Some are suggesting in this Google News Publisher Center Help thread that this is a bug. Chris Andrews, a Google Product Expert, said "Google is aware and working on it." He added, "it's a bug."
Google did fix this bug this morning and all seems good now.
As I said in my initial coverage of this news, this may be seen as a huge letdown since Google said it would look to improve the news publisher acceptance process earlier this year. Removing features here will just seem to confuse more publishers in an already confusing environment. As a reminder, this all started when Google stopped with manual Google News inclusion for a black-boxed automated Google News inclusion process in 2019.
Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said back then in regards to this on X about this. He wrote:
To clarify (some people get this, I know -- but others get confused)....Content is automatically considered for Google News and news surfaces, as has been the case since Dec. 2019. That hasn't changed.
Publisher Center offered a way to create source pages manually, which did not somehow get content overall considered for Google News and news surfaces.
Some who made these pages would get confused and think source page = content in Google News and news surfacs. We've tried to clarify this more over the years, such as with this blog post (I've screenshotted the key part).
Despite that, some still get confused because ... yeah, it's confusing! So part of this change is eliminating that confusion. Sites small and big are still automatically considered, as the update says (also screenshot attached).
Also, anticipating those who say we should do more to include more news sites -- moving to automatic consideration has helped, versus the past where someone would actually have to know to apply. That said, yes, there's always more we can do -- it's something I push on (and I'm not alone) especially in cases where sites are not having their content appear at all in news queries but are referenced by other who do. I'd really like to see us improve with this.
Again, this bug is now resolved.
Forum discussion at X and Google News Publisher Center Help.
