Google News and Changing Design

Will a new site template cause indexing to fail?

[vincevincevince]

We have a site which we are lucky enough to have included in Google News. There are issues with CTR/CPC which we are hoping to address partly through a new template for the site, new ad placements, etc.

I do have a concern about whether this will stop Google's indexing our our site. The reason I ask is because the New Robot seems to have a special setup. We had to place unique 3+ digit identifiers in each story URL just to get indexed, and it never strays from the news section of our site. I am worried that someone or something has worked out a fixed pattern to match the content section of our news articles - and changing the template may well skew that irretrievably.