February 28, 2009 by James Oliver
Google News has begun dropping publishers from their index. Forums are filled with threads from disgruntled publishers who have been unceremoniously dropped from the site and seen their traffic plummet accordingly. Even sites which had enjoyed the increased visibility of a Google News listing for years have found themselves on the reject pile. So what is Google up to?
Well, as always we can only guess at that exactly but the most obvious explanation would be that Google are unhappy with the quality of the content on some of these sites and are therefore attempting to cull some of the lesser blogs and sites in order to improve the overall quality and therefore popularity of the site.
That, needless to say, is not the way that most of the deleted sites see it. They’re mostly small, independent publishers, who are using this as an excuse to accuse Google of not supporting the little guy and even, bizarrely, of attempting to save the newspaper industry by hampering their progress – not really Google’s job. I don’t want to pour scorn on fellow bloggers, but to be honest this sounds a little like sour grapes.
Related posts:
- Getting into Google News
- Google News Site Enhances User Personalisation Features
- Exciting changes to Google Search: News Timeline
- Google to recommend brands on relevant searches – Bad news for the SEO industry
- Good and Bad news for Google after first quarter results posted
- What’s Global Link Popularity?
