Google Removing News Sites But Can't Say Why

A Google News Help thread has an announcement from the Google News team by Harvey P. of Google. He said that Google does publisher reviews periodically and removes publishers they feel are not within the guidelines of their news criteria. Google must have recently done this because there has been a spike in complaints from publishers recently being removed from Google News.

Google admitted to this but said they cannot state publicly why a news publication was removed. They can help with technical issues but not with removal issues.

Harvey P. said:

In the hope of providing the best news sources to our users, we periodically review sites in our database. Sometimes, we include or remove sites based on a series of quality guidelines. We are committed to applying these guidelines fairly across every site we review.

Some publishers have recently expressed frustration in the forum following the removal of certain sites from Google News. While we encourage publishers to seek help and advice from other publishers, Google employees don't comment publicly on why a specific site has been removed from Google News.

Our team will continue posting in this forum. We’ll always provide technical know-how or advanced troubleshooting whenever possible. However, when it comes to questions seeking input about a site's removal, our team will not provide public feedback. For any sites that have been notified of rejection or removal, we encourage you to contact us through our Help Center, found here.

Due to the high volume of inquiries we receive, we can't promise personalized responses for every email. We're sorry for any frustrations this may cause, but we will conduct a thorough review of your site and take the appropriate action for our users and our partner sites.

As always, we appreciate your enthusiasm for Google News.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.