Tuesday, September 01, 2009
During my stint on the
“How Google Works Tour: Seattle“,
I heard plenty of questions regarding News Search from esteemed members of the press, such as
The Stranger,
The Seattle Times
and
Seattle Weekly.
After careful note-taking throughout our conversations, the News team and I compiled this
presentation to provide background and FAQs for all publishers interested in
Google News Search.
Along with the FAQs about News Sitemaps and PageRank in the video above, here’s additional Q&A
to get you started:
Would adding a city name to my paper—for example, changing our name from “The Times” to “The
San Francisco Bay Area Times”—help me target my local audience in News Search?
No, this won’t help News rankings. We extract geography and location information from the article
itself (see video). Changing your name to include relevant keywords or adding a local address in
your footer won’t help you target a specific audience in our News rankings.
What happens if I accidentally include URLs in my News Sitemap that are
older than 72 hours?
We want only the most recently added URLs in your News Sitemap, as it directs Googlebot to your
breaking information. If you include older URLs, no worries (there’s no penalty unless you’re
perceived as maliciously spamming—this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just
won’t include those URLs in our next News crawl.
To get the full scoop, check out the video!
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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