Google’s Lisa Wang from the News team announced that some features are being deprecated with the recent update to Google News.
As we reported a few weeks ago, the standout and original source tags and Editors’ Picks will be going away. Additionally, a the news crawl error tool in Google Search Console and the ability for publishers to highlight mobile apps in Google News Publisher Center will be removed.
“Our goal is to engage the publisher community with features that bring substantial value to both our publishers and our users. Some of the underlying ideas for these deprecated features may show up in new ways in the future,” wrote Wang.
News crawl error tool on Search Console
Google said it has or will be deprecating the News crawl errors tool in Google Search Console. The tool has a section for Google News publishers with news-only errors, including the following errors:
- Article disproportionately short.
- Article fragmented.
- Article too long.
- Article too short.
- Date not found.
- Date too old.
- Empty article.
- Extraction failed.
- No sentences found.
- Off-site redirect.
- Page too large.
- Title not allowed.
- Title not found.
- Uncompression failed.
- Unsupported content type.
I still see some of these errors showing up as recently as yesterday, so maybe it was not deprecated yet.
Ability to highlight mobile apps in Google News Publisher Center
This is a feature within the Google News Publisher Center, which has a small subset of functional features for publishers. The section to highlight your mobile app URLs is going away, according to Google. But like the Search Console news-specific errors, I still see the feature available:
