These days, online news only really succeeds if it can be easily and quickly found. On Feb. 11, Google’s Abe Epton posted to the official Google News blog a list of eight ways to help Google News better crawl your site.
This advice isn’t new, but it’s a good reminder. Because in an era when Google News and other major aggregators are a huge source of traffic (and hence, potential ad revenue) to news sites, I am stunned at how often I still encounter news sites that routinely overlook these basics.
Here are some of the tips:
- Keep the article body clean. Don’t break up your article body with tags, ads (even Google Adsense), sidebars or other non-article content.
- Make article URLs permanent and unique. In particular, don’t reuse article URLs, and avoid including session IDs in your article URLs.
- Include stock ticker symbols. The Google News Sitemaps tool (which your site is already using, right?) lets publishers specify stock ticker symbols for companies mentioned in articles. This may not be traditional narrative style, but these symbols help Google more accurately assess what your articles are about, which can help drive traffic.
- Make publication dates explicit. Specifically, place the date and time of each story in the HTML code for the article page, between the title and body sections. Also, Epson notes: “Article times and dates displayed on Google News reflect the time at which we originally crawled the articles, and may not be the same as the publication date.”
All eight of these tips are worth reading. You can find more details on implementing this advice in Epson’s post — and much more info on these and other issues in the Google News technical requirements for news publishers.
(Hat tip to Martin Stabe.)
