Do you subscribe to Google News RSS feeds? Well, you may have noticed that they appear to be completely broken now.
Google News will be deprecating their old RSS feed subscription URLs by December 1, 2017. That means if you have Google News RSS feed subscriptions from a year or so ago, you will need to go through all those subscriptions and update them.
A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land, “We are making some necessary improvements to our system that powers RSS feeds. … As a result of this update, the Google News RSS URL pattern is changing.”
To update your RSS feeds, you need to go to https://news.google.com and select the section you want or create a custom section. At the bottom of the section’s page, click RSS. This will make the feed appear. Copy the URL from the address bar to get the new URL for the RSS feed.
Google told us the old RSS URLs will no longer work effective December 1, 2017. The truth is, it seems to me that the old RSS feed URLs are beyond broken today, a month before the December 1 deadline.
Yesterday afternoon, my old RSS feed subscriptions began showing a message in the feeds that read:
This RSS feed URL is deprecated.
This RSS feed URL is deprecated, please update. New URLs can be found in the footers at https://news.google.com/news.
I spoke to Google, and Google told me it was about changing the new feeds to a new system, and they will get those old feeds back up. They did get those old feeds back up, but those old feeds seem to be completely irrelevant. I am seeing stories completely unrelated to any keywords I have in my feed subscription. I am unsure if Google plans on fixing the old RSS feed URLs or if they will tell searchers to update to the new URLs.
It is sad, because I believe Google could have redirected the old RSS feed URL patterns to the new RSS feed URL patterns for those using them. But for some reason, I am not clear on why, they did not take this approach.
Google News Broke All My RSS Feeds, Manual Action Required For Fix
Yesterday afternoon, all my Google News RSS feeds stopped working. I and my friend Gary Price from infoDocket spotted the issue early on. The RSS feeds from Google News were showing "this RSS feed URL is deprecated." It goes on to say "this RSS feed URL is deprecated, please update. New URLs can be found in the footers at https://news.google.com/news."
I thought this can't be right, we all know old RSS feed URLs can be 301 redirects to the new URLs automatically. But for some reason, Google is not doing that.
Google later posted in the Google News Help forums this message:
We are making some necessary improvements to our system that powers RSS feeds. As a result of this update, the Google News RSS URL pattern is changing. In order to continue getting RSS feeds on your websites, please follow these instructions:On a computer, go to https://news.google.com and select the section you want or create a custom section. At the bottom of the section’s page, click RSS. This will make the feed appear. Copy the URL from the address bar to get the new URL for the RSS feed.
The old RSS URL patterns will no longer work effective December 1st, 2017.
We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.
So it seems that I will now need to go through hundreds of my RSS feed subscriptions and update the URLs manually and kill off the older ones.
To make it worse, it looks like all the existing RSS feeds are a mess. They are returning irrelevant results in the old feeds. So it feels like I need to update all the URLs right now, and I don't have until December 1st to make the switch.
For example, here is a CIA article that came back for Eric Schmidt of Google:
I am surprised more folks are not complaining about this. I wish I had more time to prepare for this before all the news feeds went haywire.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
Update: 24 hours later from posting this story, the news results even on the older feed URLs have become better quality. I will be updating my feed URLs manually in the short term, as Google never got back to me on the redirect question.
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