For about a week, a Google News indexing bug prevented a subset of Google News publishers from being indexed and thus discovered in Google News. One of those publishers appeared to have been the major gossip site, TMZ.
As many publishers know, Google News can be an instrumental traffic source for attracting new visitors to a site. Without Google News, only sites owned by Rupert Murdoch can survive (a bit of search humor). But many sites really depend on Google News to bring in new visitors.
So when Google News is not indexing your publication and you are not getting traffic from Google News, it can be an issue.
Starting about a week ago, some publishers began noticing a traffic decline from Google. They posted a thread on Monday at the Google News Help forum and Google replied that it was a Google bug. Google said:
Hi Chi-Loong, and other publishers reporting their sites have stopped being indexed,We've heard your concerns. Please be assured that our engineering team is looking into this. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Today I noticed that it was not just a few small publishers, but also major ones like TMZ. The Webmaster for TMZ posted his own thread where Harvey from Google responded, "This issue your noticing may be related to a technical issue our team noticed in the last few days that is affecting a small group of publishers. This should be resolved soon."
I do not believe this site was affected but I really have no idea how many a "small group of publishers" really means.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
