How does Google Alerts classify sites/pages as News or Blog?

[rundmw]

One of my clients who views himself as a "News" site seems to be listed in Google Alerts as a "Blog".

How does Google classify sites/pages (for the purpose of Google Alerts) as News vs Blog? How could that classification be changed?

Any ideas, greatly appreciated. Thanks and cheers!

[jimbeetle]

Welcome rundmw.

For blogs Google relies mostly on RSS feeds. See Which blogs are included in Blog Search? [google.com].

Google News requires approval as a source. See Submitting Your Content: Google News [google.com].

[rundmw]

Wow, that sure nailed the answer. Can't believe I missed it in my own searches. Must need more coffee...

Thanks!

[rundmw]

The Technical Guidelines for inclusion in Google News has following for Article URLs [google.com]:

Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For example, we can't crawl an article with this URL: [google.com...] We can, however, crawl an article with this URL: [google.com...]

Keep in mind that if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as [google.com...] we won't be able to crawl it.

Any idea what the thinking is there?

As for implementation, I guess I'll have to:

• change my CMS to generate the number for each article;
  
• use that number in the URL I render;
  
• add some RewriteRules to do a 301-redirect on the old number-less URLs.
  

Ugh...

Thanks for any ideas about what their motivation might be.

Cheers!