Just a heads up; Google has become even more aggressive in their effort to stop barrage of junk news networks doing nothing but parroting other news sites, press release newswires, etc. Over 10,000 popped up starting in 2023-2025. In Q4/25 Google started removing low quality sites from Google News, then moved on to the main search (!).
Sites with too much “non origin” content, may be hidden, even using “show duplicate” quoted search for “headline” and/or site:yoursite.ooo.
This means it’s now critical to be a “first origin” content creator, and not repost other site content, even if linking to them; avoid AI junk content farms and remove stuff like tags with only one item attached to it, redundant content (e.g., black friday deals from 2023 not relevant in 2026).
Couple of my sites that pre-date Google News got caught in this. Two have recovered. The two that got whacked rank highly in the Bing/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo streams, luckily.
One of my blogs (all original content), had 1200 pages deindexed last year, and just got email from Google saying “eror has bee fixed- error 1200 pages scraped but not indexed” (or something like that). On my music blog, I deleted a rogue redirect plugin, removed old tags from decade ago, and cleaned things up.
This is a real issue with Google now “censoring” the internet if they don’t like how you roll, which is part of their new focus on being an ad platform and answer engine, and *NOT* a search engine.
Also, make sure you add the IndexNow plugin and configure it. Better to use the plugin directly than use something like Yoast.
Just food for thought. On our big site, I have deleted about 6,000 stories which were old, stale, and sourced from other sources as part of the site news “syndication” for national news.
As the old TV show* used to say, “Be careful out there.”
(*Hill Street Blues) 🙂
Hi,
Thank you for sharing your experience with our community.
Best regards,
Calin
