Getting Included in Google News - Technical Requirements
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Article Titles
Titles should be news-like and clear. Browse CNN and the Wall Street Journal to get a feel for news headlines. They usually summarize content and include the names of the main players. Including names of companies will increase the likelihood of the article showing up for company specific searches (i.e. Google, Yahoo).
Title length should be between two and twenty-two words.
Date and time are prohibited in titles. If you’re using a content management system, you can disable that feature. Article titles should appear in both the <title> tag and somewhere on the page, for example <h1> of <h2> tags.
Google does not support the usage of the title as a link (the usual case on blogs), so you must disable this feature.
URLs
To be included in Google News, article URLs should follow Google News bot standards. URLs must be unique, and each unique URL must point to only one article. URLs must be permanent, without the use of session IDs. Google does not support dates in URLs, so set up your content management system to exclude dates.
Each URL must contain at least three digits. For example:
Bad:
www.site.com/news/article/54.html
Good:
www.site.com/news/article/547.html
www.site.com/news/article/4534343.html
Google cannot crawl articles that include a year in the URL.
URL Attributes that Prevent Crawling
Any of the URL attributes below will prevent the Google News bot from crawling your link:
Google does not support news posted in a forum format.
Template
Your website template should look like a news source. Milind Mody of eBrandz recommends staying away from a blog format.
JavaScript
Google News does not support JavaScript in any form, such as links, navigation or content hidden within a script.
Redirects
Google supports redirects, meaning you can plug content (like ads) in between Google News and your article. Guidelines include no session IDs (&ID=), use of 301s for permanent redirects and a minimal number of redirects to get from one page to another. Also set the redirect time period for a short amount of time and make sure that redirects don’t point to themselves.
Many companies show ads with delays before taking users to the actual article; this is why Google supports various redirects.
To find out how the crawler would see a redirect, disable cookie, JavaScript and CSS support in your browser. You will probably see plain and ugly pages.
Frames
Frames are evil; don’t use frames. Sites that use frames call upon the dark forces from the depths of hell to be punished by low rankings and crawler problems.
Language
Google News supports only one language per page. The best code is UTF-8. Keep only one language version of the article on one page to avoid problems. If you support more than one language, you can contact the Google Team to be featured in other countries.
No Support
Google News does not support PDF articles and non-permanent content (content which sits on a URL but changes from time to time).
Next: Dynamic Pages and more >>
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