Google News and SEO

When you are optimising a website you should always be looking for opportunities to get more traffic to your website. One such possibility could be Google News. Google news is a search facility of Googles that allows people to….. Search news! News appears on Google news similar to how your pages appear in the google search index. Once you have been accepted as a news source by google then their spider will come and index your news articles. The news articles on Google news are of a high standard, because of this there are strict guidelines you must follow to even apply to be considered as a news source.

• In order for the Google crawler to correctly gather articles, each page that displays an article’s full text needs to have a unique URL that does not change. Google cannot include sites in Google News that display multiple articles at the same URL.
• The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.
• Keep in mind that Google cannot include sites for which the URL of the main page includes a date. URLs with dates in them often change on a daily or weekly basis. This prevents Google from crawling the site for new content, as Google is unable to detect the most current URL to be crawled.
• Google’s automated crawler is currently best able to crawl regular HTML links. Google is unable to crawl image links or links embedded in JavaScript.

As you can see, a lot of sites would need to be modified to be able to qualify though if you think your news articles are worthy then you should apply to be crawlled by the google news spider. From a search engine optimisation point of view putting your sites content on google news could be a great source of traffic and links for your site. Another bonus of getting included in google news is reputation and image. If people get to your site trough google news then it gives an extreamily profesional image to your company.

Gary
NSEO Programmer