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Tips for News Search

Tuesday, September 01, 2009 at 11:22 AM

Webmaster Level: All

During my stint on the "How Google Works Tour: Seattle", I heard plenty of questions regarding News Search from esteemed members of the press, such as The Stranger, The Seattle Times and Seattle Weekly. After careful note-taking throughout our conversations, the News team and I compiled this presentation to provide background and FAQs for all publishers interested in Google News Search.



Along with the FAQs about News Sitemaps and PageRank in the video above, here's additional Q&A to get you started:

Would adding a city name to my paper—for example, changing our name from "The Times" to "The San Francisco Bay Area Times"—help me target my local audience in News Search?
No, this won't help News rankings. We extract geography and location information from the article itself (see video). Changing your name to include relevant keywords or adding a local address in your footer won't help you target a specific audience in our News rankings.
What happens if I accidentally include URLs in my News Sitemap that are older than 72 hours?
We want only the most recently added URLs in your News Sitemap, as it directs Googlebot to your breaking information. If you include older URLs, no worries (there's no penalty unless you're perceived as maliciously spamming -- this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just won't include those URLs in our next News crawl.
To get the full scoop, check out the video!

The comments you read here belong only to the person who posted them. We do, however, reserve the right to remove off-topic comments.

15 comments:

Wezzzley said...

Hi Maile,
So maybe I missed it, but are our sites always considered for Google news(if already indexed organically), or do we need to sumbit our sites somewhere first so Google will crawl them specifically for news? ...other than creating the sitemap.

Susan Moskwa said...

You need to submit a site for inclusion in Google News; not all sites are automatically included.

Wezley said...

Thanks Susan.

thecouchpotatoblog said...

What is the procedure to include a website in Google News, when it has been blacklisted by Google previously?
The Couch Potato

methode said...

Hi thecouchpotatoblog,

In order to get your site in Google News you will have to suggest it using the Google News Contact Form
You will have to meet some requirements, before you can be accepted, some of these are included in the publisher FAQ.
What do you mean by blacklisted?

If you have any question, feel free to post it in the Google News Forum.

Michael Martinez said...

These are the kinds of videos Google and other search engines should be promoting to help average people understand how search works with content providers.

I'd like to see more videos from Google about how its other vertical tools work. I'm not asking for the algorithm -- just good, authoritative advice on what TO do (I'm tired of what NOT to do).

Electronics gadgets online said...

Thanks for your explaining, now i know the basic of news ranking. But i think that the method is still not very well to prevent the duplicate content.

Saurabh Kumar said...

thanks for this presentation. It makes sense and you did put in effort in putting this together.

Google news, here I come.

John said...

You did a good job, I can tell you were pretty nervous. Understandable :)

Tatang said...

what is a google news? ok I will read it again :)

A Mind for e-Business said...

You said that a requirement of Google News was to not break up article body (the news article should have sequential paragraphs).

We don't have any comments or links to post to additional pages within the article body but we do have a sidebar div container that holds some copy about an upsell. Does a div container or sidebar break up the article body? Should we use some other type of code?

shahmulk7 said...

Thank you very much for this information and i am sure it will work and it is really explained in an easy way

thanks again

Team

www.05news.com

Admin said...

How do I submit a Blogspot blog to be indexed by Google news ? there must be a more friendly way ?
I hope so ! http://jimrogers1.blogspot.com

online said...

Hi Friends, kindly clear my doubts.

I already have sitemap.xml in my website, Will it be enough for google news else googlenews site map is different from sitemap.xml. If googlenews site is different from sitemap.xml means, what is the procedure to include google news sitemap in my site? Kindly explain..

Google Webmaster Central said...

Hi everyone,

Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.

Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team