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It looks like Google is not just indexing but also ranking Google News search results pages and landing pages in Google search. This comes shortly after Google reportedly dropped Bing Discover search results pages from its index allegedly because it violated the webmaster guidelines of not noindexing search result pages.
This was spotted by Sanchit on Twitter who shared a search for [war shoot in arctic circle pinkvilla] returned Google News pages on news.google.com. Here is my screen shot, I can replicate it:
When you click on those results you are taken to a stories landing page with essentially Google News search results. Here is a screen shot of the results I see when I click on this first listing in Google:
Why is Google not blocking these in its robots.txt file?
Not only that, a [site:news.google.com] command brings back 173 million results:
Google's guidelines specifically say "Use the robots.txt file on your web server to manage your crawling budget by preventing crawling of infinite spaces such as search result pages."
I am not sure if this is a "bug" or a "feature" but it is what it is.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
