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February 12, 2009
Google News Offers 8 Tips on How to Make Your Site Crawlable
Online news publishers will want to take note of eight tips that Google News is offering to help them better index your site. Here they are:
- Keep the article body clean - keeping the content close to the title in the html and not breaking it up with a bunch of tags and other code will make it more likely that the correct content gets indexed
- Make sure article URLs are permanent and unique
- Take advantage of stock tickers in Sitemaps
- Check your encoding - make sure it's consistent and uniform
- Make your article publication dates explicit
- Keep original content separate from press releases
- Format your images properly - use large images (JPEGs are crawled better) with "reasonable" aspect rations as well as descriptive captions.
- Article Titles in Google News - be sure to have the title in both the title tag and as the headline of the page
What do you think of these tips? Let us know in the comments.
Related Reading:
Google News Enables Cross-Language Search
Google News Gets Personal
Google News Testing Updates
Posted by Nathania Johnson on February 12, 2009 12:25 PM
Comments
Christa Watson February 12, 2009 1:52 PM
Shouldn't they title this more on how to optimize crawling on articles and publications? Almost all points were related to articles rather than sites in general...Just an observation.