Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.

[Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website]

This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum.

We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index."

No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file.

Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping.

We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter.

It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas?

I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.

[RyanPurkey]

My guess is that it's less of a technical constraint and more of a non-match for Google News guidelines.  There are several things in there that could trigger the boot, (https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787) such as:

Stick to the news--we mean it! Google News is not a marketing service. We don't want to send users to sites created primarily for promoting a product or organization, or to sites that engage in commerce journalism. If your site mixes news content with other types of content, especially paid advertorials or promotional content, we strongly recommend that you separate non-news types of content. Otherwise, if we find non-news content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.

Journalistic standards. Original reporting and honest attribution are longstanding journalistic values. If your site publishes aggregated content, you will need to separate it from your original work, or restrict our access to those aggregated articles via your robots.txt file.

News content. Sites included in Google News should offer timely reporting on matters that are important or interesting to our audience. We generally do not include how-to articles, advice columns, job postings, or strictly informational content such as weather forecasts and stock data.

And so on... If you think you're in the clear try going to the Google News specific help center (on the previously linked page) and submit your site for inclusion.

[Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website]

Thanks for the ingenious advice, out of the box thinking. However, we're still in Google News. When we force Google to index a post via Fetch, it shows up in News. Plus the New Publisher page tells you that you're in News.

It's some sort of technical problem. A weird one.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Are you able to share the website that we're talking about?

[Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website]

Of course, I should have included that: Fabiusmaximus.com

[GPainter]

I'm sure you've gone over this and if so feel free to ignore me but did you make sure your sitemap is up to scratch - https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/184732?hl=en

You can also look to see if your data is up to par - https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

You can always work back from the date it stopped working see if you've done anything that may have caused this (some one changing a tag etc.) lastly there is always the giant list of things to check for Google news - http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/the-most-common-google-news-errors/

Best of luck and let us know how you get on.