September 01, 2011 – It has been on the news recently that Google News, Google’s search engine for daily news, has just recently restructured its infrastructure to crawl with Google’s primary user-agent, Googlebot.
Now with this latest update, Google News is now using the Googlebot instead of a dedicated crawler to examine web content so Google news will now be crawled by the standard Googlebot starting immediately.
What does this mean? Well, it has very little effect to most publishers and Professional SEO wise, as Google News will still respect the robots.txt entry for Googlebot-News, their former user-agent and news organizations that wish to opt out of Google News can continue to do so though considering the reach of Google News network, it is not advisable.
Though most elements of crawling remain the same with the new update, SEO Services providers should still be aware of some minor differences.
- When it comes to news content, the Googlebot has been set to behave identically to the news crawler; a negative “Googlebot-News” entry in the robots.txt file will still stop the news crawling, sitemaps will still be crawled, and all analytics for actual visitors will remain the same.
- On examination of your site logs, you will see the Googlebot user-agent, which will make it slightly harder to know if your site is being indexed and included in Google News. However Google advices that you can check whether your site is included in Google News by searching with the “site:” operator. To do this, simply go to news.google.com and enter “site:yoursite.com,” conduct the search, and see if you get any results. If you do, then your site is being indexed for news content.
- The Googlebot guidelines are now fully applicable for news content. This means that any pages that need payment or login before it can be viewed will not be fully indexed. Rather, Google’s crawler can only see the title and user-visible snippet. Google has provided some information and potential solutions for subscription publishers via a webmaster help article.
Generally, this latest update does not really affect Google’s ranking algorithm. However, SEO Packages providers might still be interested for it might be of some help for news sites they are handling.
Posted by SEO Australia
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