Monday, August 04, 2014
Cross-posted on the
Google News Blog
If you’re a news publisher, your website has probably evolved and changed over time—just
like your stories. But in the past, when you made changes to the structure of your site, we might
not have discovered your new content. That meant a lost opportunity for your readers, and for you.
Unless you regularly checked Webmaster Tools, you might not even have realized that your new
content wasn’t showing up in Google News. To prevent this from happening, we are letting you make
changes to our record of your news site using the just launched
Google News Publisher Center.
With the Publisher Center, your potential readers can be more informed about the articles they’re
clicking on and you benefit from better discovery and classification of your news content. After
verifying ownership of your site using Google Webmaster Tools, you can use the Publisher Center to
directly make the following changes:
- Update your news site details, including changing your site name and labeling your
publication with any relevant source labels (for example, “Blog”, “Satire” or “Opinion”) - Update your section URLs when you change your site structure (for example, when you add a
new section such as https://example.com/2014commonwealthgames or
https://example.com/elections2014) - Label your sections with a specific topic (for example, “Technology” or “Politics”)
Whenever you make changes to your site, we’d recommend also checking our record of it in the
Publisher Center and updating it if necessary.
Try it out, or
learn more about
how to get started.
At the moment the tool is only available to publishers in the U.S. but we plan to introduce it in
other countries soon and add more features. In the meantime, we’d love to
hear from you
about what works well and what doesn’t. Ultimately, our goal is to make this a platform where news
publishers and Google News can work together to provide readers with the best, most diverse news
on the web.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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