Wednesday, December 02, 2009 at 8:02 AM
Webmaster Level: IntermediateToday we are announcing a new user agent for robots.txt called Googlebot-News that gives publishers even more control over their content. In case you haven't heard of robots.txt, it's a web-wide standard that has been in use since 1994 and which has support from all major search engines and well-behaved "robots" that process the web. When a search engine checks whether it has permission to crawl and index a web page, the "check if we're allowed to crawl this page" mechanism is robots.txt.
Publishers could easily contact us via a form if they didn't want to be included in Google News but did want to be in Google's web search index. Now, publishers can manage their content in Google News in an even more automated way. Site owners can just add Googlebot-News specific directives to their robots.txt file. Similar to the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image user agents, the new Googlebot-News user agent can be used to specify which pages of a website should be crawled and ultimately appear in Google News.
Here are a few examples for publishers:
Include pages in both Google web search and News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
This is the easiest case. In fact, a robots.txt file is not even required for this case.
Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /
This robots.txt file says that no files are disallowed from Google's general web crawler, called Googlebot, but the user agent "Googlebot-News" is blocked from all files on the website.
Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow:
When parsing a robots.txt file, Google obeys the most specific directive. The first two lines tell us that Googlebot (the user agent for Google's web index) is blocked from crawling any pages from the site. The next directive, which applies to the more specific user agent for Google News, overrides the blocking of Googlebot and gives permission for Google News to crawl pages from the website.
Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /latest_news
User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /archives
The pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.
Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
This robots.txt file tells Google that Googlebot, the user agent for our web search crawler, should not crawl any pages from the site. Because no specific directive for Googlebot-News is given, our News search will abide by the general guidance for Googlebot and will not crawl pages for Google News.
For some queries, we display results from Google News in a discrete box or section on the web search results page, along with our regular web search results. We sometimes do this for Images, Videos, Maps, and Products, too. This is known as Universal search results. Since Google News powers Universal "News" search results, if you block the Googlebot-News user agent then your site's news stories won't be included in Universal search results.
We are currently testing our support for the new user agent. If you see any problems please let us know. Note that it is possible for Google to return a link to a page in some situations even when we didn't crawl that page. If you'd like to read more about robots.txt, we provide additional documentation on our website. We hope webmasters will enjoy the flexibility and easier management that the Googlebot-News user agent provides.
16 comments:
Cool! So is it a follow-up to Microsoft and News Corp pact?
how it works?
thanks for the info
this is really niece update...
http://www.hackingtrick.com/
I need help not sure of this is the right place to list this but I have submitted a sitemap in Google webmaster tools and the number of indexed pages is 344 lower then before it was submitted - is this due to the newly submitted sitemap being crawled from 0 again so its only so far through it up to now.
Plz send me Google voice...request
How about giving users the ability to filter out specific content providers?
My Wife and I are new webmasters, and are still in the uncertain stage of development. We are constantly wondering if we did everything properly. We published our AllSportTailgating.com site over a month ago, and haven't seen it on the search engines yet. We believe the GoogleBot feature should be used by all new site publishers to assess their site early on.
yeah.., this is the article i've been looking for!
GreaT!!!
THanKS...
so does this work if you have a blogger blog? My site has been accepted onto Google News but it has been impossible for us to allow the disallowed robots to index our posts. How do you add the robots.txt file to your blogger blog??
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated
thanks for sharing very informative post...
Nice Post ! More control over G crawler, its great
Is there a comprehensive list of google's bots? I.E. News, Adsbot, Mediaspartner, Image, Mobile.
It would be very effecient of my article directory if I designate bots for specific content
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
http://geologist-jobs.blogspot.com/robots.txt
I understand Blocking the "/search" subdirectory is benefit.
But my site http://geologist-jobs.blogspot.com was indexed in Google last week. (6 th position in 1st page of google search results using keyword geologist jobs blogspot)
but after this "disallow" in robot.text, my site (home page) is not listed anywhere in search results. what could i do for this issue. can anyone plz help me?
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
Post a Comment