It seems like Google News has been dropping publishers from their index. We have several posts in the Google News Help forum. There are a bunch of threads from upset publishers, including two large threads here and here.
Jason Dowdell, Founder & Editor of MarketingShift.com was one of those publishers who noticed his site being dropped by Google News. Jason told me his site has been in Google News for over 4 years now and as of today, his content is no longer getting picked up. In addition, Jason told me, he no longer sees the "News" tab in Google Webmaster Tools Diagnostics area. To me, that is a clear sign that his site is no longer syndicated by Google News.
As you can see, the last article indexed by Google News from MarketingShift.com was from yesterday, even though, MarketingShift.com has new articles today.
Jason feels like Google is going after the smaller sites making him feel that Google doesn't value the small publishers who work hard to produce "quality content day in and day out." Jason told me that he, "personally spent $25k a year for the past 4 years on MarketingShift, by employing full time writers because we wanted to make sure we remained in Google News and abided by their quality content guidelines."
Mr. Dowdell suspects that Google is dropping the small publishers to help "save the newspaper business." He quoted Google's CEO, in a recent CNN publication, with his solution to help the newspaper industry:
I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I've been using is 'merge without merging.' The Web allows you to do that, where you can get the Web systems of both organizations fairly well integrated, and you don't have to do it on exclusive basis.
Is Google really going this far to drop small publishers in order to try to save the newspaper business? As far as I know, this site (which is a small publication), is still indexed by Google News.
For all I know, this can be a temporary bug. Google has not yet made a post or commented on these allegations but I will try to get you a comment shortly.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
Update: Google told me this was an indexing bug. Here is a statement from Google:
Starting earlier today, some publishers noticed that Google News was not crawling their site properly. This issue has now been resolved. We know how important Google News is to publishers, and we take issues like these very seriously.
