Stay organized with collections
Save and categorize content based on your preferences.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Good news for webmasters of English-language news sites: If your site is currently included in
Google News, you can now create News
Sitemaps that tell us exactly which articles to crawl for inclusion in Google News. In addition,
you can access crawl errors, which tell you if there were any problems crawling the articles in
your News Sitemaps, or, for that matter, any articles on your site that Google News reaches
through its normal crawl.
Freshness is important for news, so we recrawl all News Sitemaps frequently. The
News Sitemaps XML definition
lets you specify a publication date and time for each article to help us process fresh articles in
timely fashion. You can also specify keywords for each article to inform the placement of the
articles into sections on Google News.
If your English-language news site is currently included in Google News, the news features are
automatically enabled in Webmaster Tools; just add the site to your account. Here's how the new
summary page will look:
The presence of the News crawl link on the left indicates that the news features are
enabled. A few things to note:
You will only have the news features enabled if your site is currently included in Google News.
If it's not, you can
request inclusion.
In most cases, you should
add the site
for the hostname under which you publish your articles. For example, if you publish your
articles at URLs such as https://www.example.com/business/article123.html, you
should add the site https://www.example.com/. Exception: If your site is within a
hosting site, you should add the site for your home page, for example,
https://members.tripod.com/mynewssite/. If you publish articles under multiple
hostnames, you should add a site for each of them.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["English-language news sites included in Google News can now utilize News Sitemaps for enhanced article crawling and inclusion."],["News Sitemaps allow webmasters to specify publication date/time and keywords for articles, improving freshness and section placement on Google News."],["Webmasters of eligible sites can access news features, including crawl errors, within Google Webmaster Tools after adding and verifying their site."],["Sites not currently in Google News can request inclusion, while sites within hosting environments require specific homepage addition for proper functionality."],["Google plans to expand news features to more languages in the near future."]]],["Webmasters with English-language news sites in Google News can now create News Sitemaps, specifying articles for crawling and including publication dates/times and keywords. This enables frequent recrawling for freshness. News features are enabled in Webmaster Tools for included sites, accessible via a \"News crawl\" link. Sites should be added using their article hostname or homepage if on a hosting site. Verification of sites is required for the news features. Google will extend these features to other languages.\n"]]
