In a bit of an accident, Google had removed a number of news publishers from Google News over the past few days. In the Google News forums, several publishers were found complaining. This was confirmed by Google that this was an accident.
At the time when this was reported (January 8), publishers weren’t expected to be reinstated into Google News by the end of that day.
Maricia Scott, engineering director Google News, had this to say:
We apologize for the issue that resulted in a number of sites being delisted from Google News. This was an unintentional technical issue and not something we did manually. We are working hard to identify the sites that were incorrectly affected and will get them back in as soon as we possibly can.
If you think your news site is included in Google News issue, conduct a site command in Google News or searching for recent story headlines in Google News. You can also check your index status in the Google News Publisher Center.
If you were one of the news sites that isn’t coming up in Google News, and you see a dip in traffic because of it, don’t worry. Google is working on it.
At around 4:45 EST on January 8, news publishers began reporting that their sites were now back in the Google News index.