Scott Services: Google News to deprecate old RSS feed URLs on December 1, 2017

Friday, 3 November 2017

Google News to deprecate old RSS feed URLs on December 1, 2017

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.