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I've been struggling with a problem for a full month now, and I just got an answer to it which surprised and sickened me.
My site had the good fortune to have Google News begin monitoring it. It brought in a reasonable level of visitors with interests in my topics, that otherwise might not have found the site.
Great - but the site was on a shared hosting server, and we started to have quite a number of growing pains. So we moved to a dedicated server, with a new IP address. Updated our DNS accordingly, and all was well.
Except Google News. It stopped picking up articles altogether. If I checked the reports and for the old server, I could see their crawler still making its periodic hit to the site. Damn. I waited a few days for it to refresh DNS, and then contacted the Google News team.
Google News took a long time to reply to me, and in the mean time I started duplicating articles from the new server to the old server so it would keep picking them up. In the meantime, I had to pay another month for shared hosting, which more or less doubles my costs.
Google News finally responded to me, asking what my problem was! I politely sent off another email, trying to explain the problem again.
I then decided to investigate moving the old IP address from my old server to the dedicate server - but my webhosting provider refused to offer that. I then had them place a redirect on my IP address to the new IP address (after some necessary code changes at my end). It turns out that Google News' crawler will follow 1 redirect without issue (don't ask what happens if you put more than 1 redirect though ... ). However, any articles that go out via this method don't show my site URL, but rather the IP address. I can live with that for the moment.
Today, however, after much chasing up on my behalf, I get the most aggravating and frustrating email from Google. Basically telling me that Google News is in beta (I know that, or I wouldn't be having this issue), they regret that they're having trouble finding my new server, and if anything changes at MY END they'll let me know!
I know for sure the issue is not at my end. Google News is - without question - the only problem I've had in the entire changeover. Unfortunately, the intent of the email is "we don't know, we don't want to know, and it's probably your fault anyway".
I have also found others recently who have had exactly the same issue after changing IP addresses. The difference is, they've only noticed that Google News has stopped working, but not associated it with IP address change.
I'm almost convinced they're using HOSTS file entries to connect to servers...
Kinda hoping for help here! While I can probably live without Google News - I'd certainly rather not!
Thanks in advance,
Matt
[edited by: Marcia at 4:35 am (utc) on April 6, 2004]
Recent comments by others here have indicated that the recognition time for changed IPs has come down a lot but whether this is true or not, I'm not sure.
My best advice would be to get lots of new backlinks and then remove the old IP completely. Then pray.
J
Perhaps I could convince them to remove me from Google News altogether and then add me back in. That may be my last hope - perhaps GoogleGuy can help :-)
I definitely don't have a problem with the normal Google crawl. Googlebot loves my site. That's why I'm mystified as to this ridiculous problem with one aspect of Google that really just seems to leverage off the standard crawl. I'm very angry that it's taken me a full month to get an answer - especially given the extremely poor answer I've ultimately received!
I know my site's not a major news site, and it's really just a tiny niche site, but I was putting some great stories out there, and it really seemed as though people were finding it useful. It's not essential to my traffic - I can attract my own visitors quite fine, it seems - but it was a useful aid both to me and to people searching for current news in this particular niche, and I can't stand to see it being lost to such a simple problem!
TJ
I know it's a beta service, and as such it's a privilege to be in it... but they are certainly pretty free with their acceptance into the program, and I'd like to think they feel they have some responsibility toward participants. :-(
But I dunno. I don't necessarily have a right to have it... but I feel pretty shortchanged by this response and lack of effort.
I changed webhosts in March and Google News has not been to the site since. As you mentioned, the standard spider has no problem with my site either. I exchanged a handful of e-mails with then, but it ended with the same e-mail they sent you. So far, I have yet to be reincluded.
If anyone learns more about this, please post it here.
It also had content I added last night, so I can only assume Google News did something system wide that fixed both my and mmarlor's problem on the 8th.
best,
GG
