Getting Listed on Google News

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I've moved all of my blogging activity to The Lucid Blog.
You can visit my new home at:
www.thelucidblog.com

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As you may be aware, The Nettle is owned by Paypershop Ltd, a small family company based in Leeds, UK.

Our main website is www.paypershop.com, a website dedicated to payroll and HR professionals.

August 2004, Ian (my boss) decided he wanted our payroll news to be indexed in Google News. He writes the payroll news himself so this is all original content.

Out of the millions of websites out there, Google News only use about 4,500 different sources so I figured our chances of being included were fairly slim. But I submitted our details anyway.

Heard nothing in reply and forgot all about it until we got an email in November 2004.

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Hi David,

Thank you again for your submission. We apologize for our delayed response. We have reviewed your site and will be including it in Google News in the near future. You should be able to find your articles in Google News within four to six weeks.

Thank you for providing your articles to Google News.

Regards,
The Google Team
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Good news right?

Except our news items steadfastly refused to appear in their results. Promptly forgot about it again.

Then in May 2005, Ian pestered me to chase it up.

I submitted again. This time, using our RSS feed. Got this reply.


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Hi David,

Thank you for providing us with your RSS feed. At this time, we don't accept RSS feeds for inclusion in Google News. Google News currently gets articles by crawling online news sites.

Upon review of your site, we've found that our system cannot crawl some of your articles because of the format of their URLs. In order to have your articles crawled by Google News, their URLs must contain a number consisting of at least three digits.

For example, our news crawler would not crawl articles with the following URLs:

www.google.com/news/article23.html
www.google.com/lemurs_in_the_mist.html

It would crawl these pages:

www.google.com/news/08112003/article.html
www.google.com/news/lemurs_in_the_mist/23467.html

An example of a site that we are able to crawl successfully is http://english.chosun.com. Please note that each article on this site has a highly unique URL.

We apologize for this limitation of our system. If you are able to make changes on your end to allow us to crawl your content, please let us know.

Regards,
The Google Team
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Now my technical knowledge is slim at best, but I found hard to believe that Google's technology was so limited that it couldn't read URL's without numbers in them.

Anyway, mine is not to questions why and all that. I figured it might be a way of deciding which sources were really serious about being included.

So we changed the way we name our URL's so that they included a 3-digit number.

I emailed Google to tell them the good news. They replied:

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Hi Ian,

Thank you for your note. We apologize for our delayed response. Upon recent review of your site, we have found that we cannot include it in Google News at this time. We do not include sites that are maintained by a single individual. Similarly, we do not include sites that do not have a formal editorial review process. We appreciate your taking the time to contact us and will log your site for consideration should our requirements change.

Regards,
The Google Team
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Wa-hey! More hoops to jump through.

The first one was easy. I wrote to say that PayPerShop is administered by not one, but 4 people.

The "formal editorial review process" made me scratch my head a bit. I wrote to ask what this was, but mentioned that all of our pages are added manually and are checked before being uploaded.

Two weeks later and I've yet to receive a reply, but a week last Monday, Google News started indexing our news items and press releases.

The best of it is that they are added to Google News within minutes of me uploading them.

Now THAT is some fast indexing.

A strange experience to be sure, but I right now I don't care. We're now one of the 4,500 elite and I've very happy about it.

If you want to check it out, go to http://news.google.com/ and do a search for paypershop.