How to Adapt Your SEO Strategy for Google News’ New Algorithmic Rules

Gist

• Google News has fully transitioned to algorithmically generated publication pages, eliminating manually submitted publication pages and RSS feeds as of March 2025 as part of its strategic redesign. [3][2]
• Publishers will lose significant control over visual elements (logos, titles), custom section structure, and geographic distribution, except for News Showcase participants. [3]
• The changes increase reliance on Google’s automated systems for content visibility, with ranking based on relevance, prominence, freshness, language, and authoritativeness, rather than publisher curation. [3]
• There is potential for reduced visibility and traffic for some publishers, raising strategic concerns about adaptation in SEO, metadata management, and content presentation. [3]

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On February 10, 2025, Google announced that it would deprecate manually submitted publication pages and RSS feeds in Google News, fully transitioning to automatically generated publication pages by late March 2025. [3] This change removes publisher-controlled elements such as custom sections, titles, logos, and the ability to restrict geographic distribution (outside of News Showcase). [3] The implementation was completed by late March 2025. [3]

For publishers, this represents a shift in control over presentation and curation of their content inside Google News. Previously, publisher curation allowed tailoring of display order, organizing content into thematic sections, setting logos and headers, and filtering by geography. Under the new system, all that is algorithmically determined. [3]

In place of manual control, Google will rely on algorithmic signals like content relevance, freshness, prominence, language and location preferences, and authoritativeness to rank and display content. [3] This raises the importance of metadata, structured data, topic tagging, and site-level SEO elements, as these automated systems become now primary levers.

Strategic implications:

• Publishers who relied on customization and manual structuring to differentiate themselves may need to shift strategy toward optimizing content quality, E-E-A-T, metadata, and structured content design to maintain visibility.
• Loss of geo-restriction control may force reconsideration of regional targeting strategies or could lead to unintended exposure of content in regions where publishers may have legal or policy constraints.
• Advertisers, agencies, and analytics professionals should anticipate changes in traffic sources and the discoverability of news content; metrics like clicks from Google News may decline if content presentation becomes more uniform or filtered.
• Publishers may need to monitor rankings and traffic more closely, use SEO best practices and content structuring to ensure their content is surfaced appropriately under the new system.

Open questions include:

• How this change has quantitatively affected traffic for small vs large publishers since implementation—are smaller outlets disproportionately disadvantaged?
• What specific algorithmic signals are most influential under the new system—how much weight does structured data, site authority, or freshness get?
• Whether Google will offer new tools to replace lost customization, for example allowing publishers to influence algorithmic grouping, highlight specific content, or set limits on distribution.
• How this will affect user behavior—if discovery becomes more uniform and less curated, will users engage differently, less site hopping, more within-Google consumption?

Supporting Evidence

• Google announced on February 10, 2025, that it would discontinue use of manually submitted publication pages in Google News; by late March 2025, publication pages became fully automatically generated. [3]
• Publisher Center features such as custom sections, logos, publication titles, and geographic distribution settings have been removed or significantly altered for standard news content. [3]
• Only News Showcase publishers retain certain controls over logos, titles, and regional blocking; standard publishers lose most such control. [3]
• Algorithmic criteria now include relevance, prominence, authoritativeness, freshness, location, and language to determine content surface in Google News. [3]

Sources

1. [1] ppc.land (PPC.land) — 2025-03
2. [2] www.linkedin.com (LinkedIn) — 2025-02-25