Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Today we are announcing a new user agent for robots.txt called Googlebot-News that gives
publishers even more control over their content. In case you haven’t heard of
robots.txt, it’s a web-wide standard that has
been in use
since 1994
and which has support from all major search engines and well-behaved “robots” that process the
web. When a search engine checks whether it has permission to crawl and index a web page, the
“check if we’re allowed to crawl this page” mechanism is robots.txt.
Publishers could easily contact us
via a form
if they didn’t want to be included in Google News but did want to be in Google’s web search index.
Now, publishers can manage their content in Google News in an even more automated way. Site owners
can just add Googlebot-News specific rules to their robots.txt file. Similar to
the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image user agents, the new
Googlebot-News user agent can be used to specify which pages of a website should be
crawled and ultimately appear in Google News.
Here are a few examples for publishers:
Include pages in both Google web search and News:
This is the easiest case. In fact, a robots.txt file is not even required for this case.
Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:
This robots.txt file says that no files are disallowed from Google’s general web crawler,
called Googlebot, but the user agent Googlebot-News is blocked from all
files on the website.
Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:
When parsing a robots.txt file, Google obeys the most specific rule. The first two lines
tell us that Googlebot (the user agent for Google’s web index) is blocked from crawling any pages
from the site. The next rule, which applies to the more specific user agent for Google News,
overrides the blocking of Googlebot and gives permission for Google News to crawl pages from the
website.
Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:
The pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This
robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web
search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in
the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.
Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:
This robots.txt file tells Google that Googlebot, the user agent for our web search crawler,
should not crawl any pages from the site. Because no specific rule for Googlebot-News is
given, our News search will abide by the general guidance for Googlebot and will not crawl pages
for Google News.
For some queries, we display results from Google News in a discrete box or section on the web
search results page, along with our regular web search results. We sometimes do this for Images,
Videos, Maps, and Products, too. This is known as
Universal search results.
Since Google News powers Universal “News” search results, if you block the
Googlebot-News user agent then your site’s news stories won’t be included in
Universal search results.
We are currently testing our support for the new user agent. If you see any problems
please let us know.
Note that
it is possible for Google
to return a link to a page in some situations even when we didn’t crawl that page. If you’d like
to
read more about robots.txt, we provide
additional documentation on our website. We hope webmasters will enjoy the flexibility and easier
management that the Googlebot-News user agent provides.
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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