It looks like someone is playing with the pipes again, and much oddness is happening over at Google News.
My website is reguarly listed there, so reguarly indeed that I often do the following search to check which of my stories they have picked up:
Normally, that would list all my recent news articles as found by Google, along with any other news sites linking to me in the past day.
This is what roughly what I would normally expect to see:
Suddenly, it has changed – and the listing is minisule – although my site is still being spidered and appears in content based searches.
During yesterday, I did a load of screengrabs:
How the search appeared in the moring (about 5 hours after uploading a dozen news articles)
Then – weirder, a few hours later (note how the times the articles were found changes)
A bit concerned, I do a text specific search for a news article I have uploaded, and it does indeed appear:
Hmm, I log into Google Webmaster and check there for my site – and even weirder, they claim to have no news articles at all for the past week – despite what the above article specific search found.
A few hours later yet – and suddenly I am seeing what I would normally expect to see.
This morning (Friday 15th Dec) – it is back to what I noticed yesterday, listing only a few articles, even though searches which include the text I uploaded this morning do return some results.
This could be just Google tinkering, or my site is suffering some penalty of sorts (although traffic is not significantly down – yet).
I am currently banging my head against a blog which is ripping off my content, and Google do apply a “duplicate content” penalty to websites when they see identical content on two different urls. I hope I haven’t been hit by that penalty, pending lawyers doing nasty things to that scum blogger.
