New: Sitemaps for Google News Publishers

[tedster]

Nov 21: Google announced new services for sites that are Google News publishers - to give "more granular control" than robots.txt over which portions of the site are crawled and included.

Google has launched a new Sitemap protocol and additions to Google webmaster tools for Google News. This is only available to Google News publishers, so it does not pertain to any efforts around the new Sitemaps.org protocol.

...We also want to provide news organizations more visibility into which articles are ultimately included in Google News. To that end, we’re providing error reports specific to Google News that will inform webmasters of any problems we experienced crawling or extracting news articles from their pages.

[google.com...]

[mcskoufis]

Also, the help section of Google News has beed improved with answers to the most common problems new sites face. There is also a feature to contact them if some of your news stories don't get crawled.

It is funny... A few months ago they were replying with a "we can not guarantee that all your stories will be included in Google News"... Now it seems they want as much as possible.

Interesting to note that stories get indexed only once. So if you have a spelling mistake in the title and correct it, Google News won't re-crawl to show the right title...

[vincevincevince]

I wonder if we still need unique 3-digit identification numbers in the URL? I'd love to get rid of those and go back to a more friendly system.

[mcskoufis]

It is still required I'm afraid...

[Reilly]

I wonder if we still need unique 3-digit identification numbers in the URL? I'd love to get rid of those and go back to a more friendly system.

can you explain it please little more - i was accepted some weeks ago and i do not know what you mean with that 3-digit unique number...

[mcskoufis]

Didn't they ask you that your articles' urls must have at least 3 numbers on when they accepted you?

[davelms]

I've been accepted for at least 6 months now and no suggestion of specific URLs.

[Reilly]

Didn't they ask you that your articles' urls must have at least 3 numbers on when they accepted you?

no, they asked me nothing - they told me that my site was accepted but they didn't mention something about 3 unique numbers in URL .

[mcskoufis]

That's strange. I had my second site accepted in Google News a month ago and they asked me to have at least 3 digits in my article's URL for Google News to be able to index our articles.

I still have the email they sent me. Are you sure it is Google News (news.google.com) and not Google's Blog Search?

[Syzygy]

Two of our sites have been supplying to Google News for a few months - no mention of three digits/url's.

Syzygy

[edited by: Syzygy at 5:05 pm (utc) on Nov. 27, 2006]

[PBiggs]

I haven't seen any specific requests for 3 digits URLs either... but I do have another News Sitemap question:

Since a news sitemap will need to be updated much more frequently that a traditional sitemap, what are webmasters doing to accomplish this? None of the sitemap editors out there (including Google's) handle the News sitemap protocol, so it would either have to be done manually, or as Google suggests, by RSS feed. But they don't include the technical specs of the proper RSS protocol -- will any recent article feed work?

Is anyone finding one option working better than others?

[vincevincevince]

I'm going to be implementing it by modifying the same PHP script I use for the RSS feed. The details of the XML format seem clear enough to me.

I'd have liked a 'priority' tag - so that news the editor likes can be pushed up.