Google News no longer requires stupid numbers in the URL
A few months back I added 3 digit numbers to the end of all the URL’s on Blogstorm purely to get included in Google News. I’m not a fan of numbers in URLs because they don’t mean anything to users and just make it look untidy.
Yesterday I removed the numbers because it is no longer a Google News requirement, as long as you have a News Sitemap.
The three-digit-number requirement is waived if you submit a Google News sitemap in order to alert our crawler to your news articles in your Blog.
This tool will enable you to optimize the inclusion of your content without having to change the structure of your URLs. You can find more information about creating a News sitemap in our Publisher Help Center:
http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/topic.py?topic=11666
I used the Google News Sitemap generator plugin to create my sitemap.
If you want to get into Google News read the Advanced Webmasters Guide to Google News.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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This is good to know – thanks Patrick!
Thanks Patrick! Just what I needed. Not two week ago did I add a random 3 digit number! Time to take it back out again!
Cheers
Jason
Good find, thanks Patrick.
Hi,
Great news. Could you advice on other news syndicators that are as important as Google News?
That’s great news, now all my blogs have the post id in URL just for Google News.
I believe this has been the case for a couple months now. I wrote about it at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/019294.html
Thanks Barry, hadn’t spotted that.
No problem, I write too much. People easily miss stuff I write. Just wanted to add that link for date purposes, this way we know it was before Jan 28, 2009.
I always prefer a much cleaner looking URL structure. I think it works well for branding when it looks neat.
Thanks for this news about Google News, I also added digits just for them on one site. Will be losing them from now on.
Thanks for the update. I’d just read your previous article and I my first thought was crumps, that mess up the permalink structure to try and get into Google News!
I didn’t realise the potential to get into Google News was so achievable, and I have even more things to think about now when creating content! I will have to read more about the submission guidelines and see how compliance might change the structure of site content in future. Cheers, Mark.
Awesome I was about to change my permalink. Thanks for the news
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