Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Google News URL Format
-
Hi,
We are currently redesigning our gaming website (www.totallygn.com) and one of our main goals is to get listed by Google News in future.
Looking at the Google News URL requirements "The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits."
How does the above affect SEO structure? I was planning on using a format such as
www.totallygn.com/xbox-360/360-reviews/fifa-12-review
how would this compare to something like?
www.totallygn.com/xbox-360/360-reviews/fifa-12-review234
Thanks in advance for your help
-
Hi all,
Is it still the case that you can submit EITHER with 3 digits in the URL OR via a news sitemap? I can't see anything in the official instructions about the sitemap route... they seem pretty insistent on the 3 digit rule though.
-
Can we do it just by submitting a news sitemap via GWT?
-
Do you still have to go through the inclusion process here: http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=2394225&page=ts.cs&from=191208
Thanks guys... MB.
-
-
My site was just accepted in to Google News yesturday and when I went to check the sitemap for the news, Google Webmaster showed errors for the news sitemap.
So I have tried every wordpress plugin I could find, and submitted the news sitempa.
Each one had errors, the only one that worked for me and my site is now showing in Google News is this plugin BWP Google XML Sitemaps
Hope that helps
-
Hi WalesDragon,
Did these answers solve your question, or are you looking for some more advice still?
-
No worries!
I am pretty sure that plugin is the one which allows the WP admin to select JUST posts, and leave out pages... but I am not 100%.
The reason I recommended that particular plugin though, is that from experience, many of the other Google news sitemap plugins seem to cause some sort of XML error when submitting the sitemap to Google news, but this one doesn't, so using it should save a few headaches, and having to 'shop around', so to speak!
Another thing to bear in mind, is that if you have 1 section of your site (say, domain.com/news) and you have an RSS feed on there, showing a feed of a different section of your website (say, domain.com/self-promotional-company-blog), and the second blog for any reason ends up with 3 unique digital in the URL of a post, then Google news can find the link in the RSS feed of your news section, and index the page on the (self promotional blog) in error -
Sounds harmless, but if the news team then decided that you were actually TRYING to get self promotional stuff (even company news) into Google news, you could loose your news approved status... short solution is just to be careful when putting any RSS feeds (of other parts of your site/domain) on your news section!!! (Hope that makes sense?!) - I learned this the hard way (didn't get dropped or anything, as I acted swiftly to sort the issue!).
Hope that helps!
Mike.
-
Mike,
Thanks for this, I personally found it helpful. I like the idea of the Google News Plugin and will test it out on a small site.
Good info,Robert
-
In addition to the excellent response by Robert Fisher, below, you do not actually NEED to do this, but you CAN do it automatically if you choose to.
Google News needs...
EITHER a unique 3 digit code in the URL...
OR
A Google news specific sitemap.
So, your options are to either change your WP (I checked, your site is Wordpress based, yes?) Permalinks settings, to include post id, OR use a google news sitemap plugin.
You can always put a number in front of the post id, so use something like:
/%postname%/1%post_id%
So, adding a numerical '1' befor %post_id% in your permalinks.
If you are worried about lots of 404 errors due to changing your URL structure, then how about using deans permalinks migration (install it BEFORE changing your permalink settings!) - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalinks-migration-plugin-for-wordpress/
As for a Google News sitemap... For wordpress, I recommend this one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gn-xml-sitemap/
If you go down the sitemap route, do be sure that ONLY news posts are included... E.G. NOT your static, non-news content pages!
IN TERMS OF SEO -
I don't feel it will effect things too much, so long as everything else is good as regards your on-page SEO etc.
Hope that helps!
-
If you understand that the requirement for the three or more digits is around insuring that there is a unique page for each individual article. So if you look at: www.totallygn.com/xbox-360/360-reviews/fifa-12-review, It appears to me that the second 360 is still associated with reviews of games associated with XBox 360. The fifa-12-review appears to be a soccer game (I have never played on one of those things I am an intelligent worker and not involved in any type of warfare even modern).
So, the second where you have review 234 does work because the three digit number appears to give a unique numeric identifier to that article. (Note if a 4 digit number it cannot start with 199 or 200).
In the event there is something that would prevent you from using this convention, you can always create a news Sitemap. Google Support News Sitemap.
Hope this helps, best,
Edit: missed seo question: It has a positive effect on SEO as it is following Google's convention. (One question is whether or not having a news sitemap would give more credence/weight as a news site versus the unique identifier???) My guess is it would.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What could cause Google to not honor canonical URLs?
I have a strange situation on a website, when I do a Google query of site:example.com all the top indexed results appear to be queries that users can perform on the website. So any random term the user searches for on the website for some reason is causing the search result page to get indexed - like example.com/search/query/random-keywords However, the search results page has a canonical tag on it that points to example.com/search, but that doesn't seem to be doing anything. Any thoughts or ideas why this could be happening?
Technical SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Google is indexing bad URLS
Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
How do I deindex url parameters
Google indexed a bunch of our URL parameters. I'm worried about duplicate content. I used the URL parameter tool in webmaster to set it so future parameters don't get indexed. What can I do to remove the ones that have already been indexed? For example, Site.com/products and site.com/products?campaign=email have both been indexed as separate pages even though they are the same page. If I use a no index I'm worried about de indexing the product page. What can I do to just deindexed the URL parameter version? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | BT20090 -
Google Cache showing a different URL
Hi all, very weird things happening to us. For the 3 URLs below, Google cache is rendering content from a different URL (sister site) even though there are no redirects between the 2 & live page shows the 'right content' - see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://giltedgeafrica.com/tours/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://giltedgeafrica.com/about/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://giltedgeafrica.com/about/team/ We also have the exact same issue with another domain we owned (but not anymore), only difference is that we 301 redirected those URLs before it changed ownership: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.preferredsafaris.com/Kenya/2 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.preferredsafaris.com/accommodation/Namibia/5 I have gone ahead into the URL removal Tool and got denied for the first case above ("") and it is still pending for the second lists. We are worried that this might be a sign of duplicate content & could be penalising us. Thanks! ps: I went through most questions & the closest one I found was this one (http://cloudz.click/community/q/page-disappeared-from-google-index-google-cache-shows-page-is-being-redirected) but it didn't provide a clear answer on my question above
Technical SEO | | SouthernAfricaTravel0 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Google not pulling my favicon
Several sites use Google favicon to load favicons instead of loading it from the Website itself. Our favicon is not being pulled from our site correctly, instead it shows the default "world" image. https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=www.example.com Is the address to pull a favicon. When I post on G+ or see other sites that use that service to pull favicons ours isn't displaying, despite it shows up in Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc and we have the correct meta in all pages of our site. Any idea why is this happening? Or how to "ping" Google to update that?
Technical SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0