A person from Google (who’s name I didn’t catch!) came to the NewsTools 2008 Conference this afternoon and gave a very helpful rundown of how to get your breaking news article onto Google News faster….
Here’s what to do:
Know what Google is looking for?
Google crawls pages faster that have these attributes:
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Original content.
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Multiple authors.
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Proper attribution.
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Quick response time.
(Frequency of update may also factor in – such as when articles have a substantial change. Updating every minute and changing one letter will not help.)
Most legitimate news sites make the cut!
The news crawl is different than the more general Web crawl, which can make the search on news.google.com different than the search from google.com. There are two ways to get have your news site crawled:
Through the standard news crawl, once your news site is validated by Google (according to the four things above), Google crawls it and looks for things like bylines and location, whether the site has images and more. Google News automatically figures out which pages are articles and what aren’t, etc., and puts your articles in Google News accordingly. This can apparently take a while.
OR (here’s the faster way!) you can create a really simple, automated sitemap page that gets down to the article level. Sitemaps get your content on Google News much faster!
Sitemaps, Google says, are essentially feeds of semi-structured data for crawlers to ingest. It needs a simple URL – think www.newspaper.com/sitemap. The sitemaps need to be efficient – simple design with relevant information. The Google sitemap API is at http://code.google.com/more/#products-products-sitemaps.
Apparently that’s basically it…. More information on this (much more!) will be available later today on the Journalism That Matters – Silicon Valley (aka NewsTools 2008) notes wiki , which is at www.newstools.org.
You can find out if your site is getting indexed by searching for site:URL in the news.google.com search.