Has Google pulled up the drawbridge on news websites?

The recent announcement of the discontinuation of the publisher center, plus increasing movement to algorithmic news surfacing, means the days of a new news website might well be over

Back in 2019, Google announced that websites need no longer manually apply to be considered for top stories and G News.

Previously, there was a manual process where you would apply, show Google your credentials as a news publisher, and your application would be manually accepted or rejected on Google’s side.

But the 2019 update pushed everything through Google’s algorithms. The machine would decide who is deemed worthy to appear or not.

In the five years since, it has become abundantly clear to anyone with a relatively new or recent publication that the 2019 decision weighted heavily in favour of traditional news publishers, and it’s never really reset since. From a UK perspective that means the BBC, it means Sky Sports, and it means the traditional newspaper media in digital guise.

Fake News

This came in the wake of Donald Trump’s rise to the American presidency and the ongoing fear of fake news interrupting legitimate discourse. Google’s algorithms includes multiple ranking factors (200 at last count), and these include items such as how long a site had been around for in making a decision as to its veracity. But this seemed, over time, to favour traditional media ahead of more recently-formed, independent news organisations.

It has been a struggle. But it’s almost an internal test from Google, not that they would ever admit it; if your site can hang around longer, you must have a long-term news plan rather than popping up to deceive users and then disappear.

These are things that Google will never state publicly or even hint at, but any publisher at the coal face will confirm what they think they know: that the number of nascent news sites that can actually find traction on Google has dropped considerably since 2019.

RIP Google Publisher Center

Last week, Google made another announcement - that they were discontinuing the Google Publisher Center. This section allows news sites to customise how their content should appear on Google in its multiple sections, but above all was a useful way to check your RSS feed was up to date and working effectively.

Google has reiterated that ‘sites will be automatically eligible for inclusion’, and that it, also, plans to produce an automated version of the product.

But it seems like another algorithmic, black-box minefield designed to actively discourage new news publications from even bothering. It’s impossible to know if your site can be considered or not, save for following increasingly vague content policies.

So why bother?

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Google doesn’t want any more news

There’s a real argument that Google has now made the call that there is already enough news out there, and maybe people want less of it, anyway. When it comes to breaking news, whether it be current affairs, technology, the economy or sport, there are huge numbers of sites out there all producing slightly amended versions of the same simple facts.

And perhaps they’re not wrong. Maybe consumers have all the written news sources they’ll ever need. Maybe the bun fight to appear on Google News and top stories really doesn’t need a whole list of additional entrants to the space.

But it’s never been communicated in this way. Like much of Google’s dealings these days, messages are mixed and simply cannot be taken at face value. For every time they tell you backlinks don’t matter, another voice suggests the opposite.

For every time a site is punished for not having ‘helpful content’, another is boosted despite appearing broadly similar. The takeaway seems to be that the more Google relies on its algorithms to decide what people see, the less the people behind it are willing to either 1) tell the truth, or 2) actually know what is going on.

What does all this mean?

Much of what I’m discussing is through lived experience. I’m not a news SEO expert, but some of the ones I know and trust are seeing things through this lens, too. It means that now, in 2024, launching a new website focusing on news and features is simply a huge risk.

You won’t have the Facebook traffic. You won’t have the referral traffic. You won’t have the Google traffic.

The opportunities afforded to digital platforms - even five years ago - are no longer there, in website form. The drawbridge has been pulled up, the access to audience removed.

There are still opportunities for publishers looking to pursue that route to website traffic. But you just better have been around for quite a long time.