• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, April 28, 2024

Publishers can continue to customize their publications in Google’s Publishing Center. But they will no longer be able to add new ones. 

The reason is that Google is rolling out automatically created publication pages later this year. 

“By adding a publication to Publisher Center, publishers were able to manually create a source page for users to follow,” Google wrote in a post last week. “Publishers with manually created publication pages will continue to have access to customization features until later this year, when pages will shift to being automatically created.”

How do you get into the automated queue? Google answers, "Content from publishers that adheres to our content policies is automatically eligible for consideration in Google News and across News Surfaces.

That sounds rather provisional. But Google states, “Our systems automatically identify and rank eligible content based on factors like relevance, prominence, authoritativeness, freshness, location, and language.”

For instance, to be considered for Top Stories or the News tab of Search, publishers “just need to produce high-quality content and comply with Google News content policies,” Google writes.

Google's new policy will help users get “an organized experience of top stories, articles, videos, and more from around the world with Google Search,” it adds. 

But some observers are hardly satisfied.  

“This change will likely lead to even more confusion around Google News inclusion, which we have had for years since Google changed the inclusion process back in 2019,” Search Engine Land writes.

That inclusion process was dubbed a "Google failure for publishers" back in 2021, Search Engine Land continues. 

Moreover, it is also not clear how or if this will be affected by Google’s blocking of news links for some California users in response to the California Journalism Protection Act, which is now being mulled.