3 ms·

When I worked at CNET, we were (and still are) indexed by Google News despite not having three-digit numbers in URLs. That's because your excerpt from Google N

by declan 12y ago

When I worked at CNET, we were (and still are) indexed by Google News despite not having three-digit numbers in URLs. That's because your excerpt from Google News' guidelines left off a very important addendum: "Please note that this rule is waived with News sitemaps."

bushido 12y ago
Actually the big reason why it may have worked back in the day for CNET was because it was CNET. Thought these days a news sitemap suffices. I would personally still add the 3+ digit unique number to the permalinks and eventually if necessary remove it once rankings improve overall on Google News. Some Back Story ================== I consulted for a Movie News and Review website for about 6 years. We had news sitemaps and would show up on Google News once in a while, but one of the small yet significant changes that we made that increased ranking on Google News was when we implemented adding a unique number to urls. That was implemented back around 2009-2010. We stopped using that unique numbers in the URL around 2013, mostly because the numbers were becoming pretty darn big. We noticed a small downtrend in Google News traffic which stabilized in a couple of months. For anyone using Wordpress unique numbers can be added using a permalink structure such as: /%postname%-%post_id%/ If you do decide to use it don't forget to setup 301 redirects.
- franze 12y ago
  which would not fulfill (the basically deprecated) three digit spec for the first 99 posts (maybe even the first 100). also it makes the URL longer, less user friendly and you have to deal with an URL migration that you might have to revert at some point (i.e.: the example you mentioned) additionally: as it is mentioned that the 3 digit requirement is "waived" with a google news sitemap it is a strong indicator that this is a crawling, not a ranking directive. my 2 cents: don't do it, as it would be a clear violation of the golden URL rule a.k.a. "Don't overdo the f###### URLs!"

by declan 12y ago

bushido 12y ago

Actually the big reason why it may have worked back in the day for CNET was because it was CNET. Thought these days a news sitemap suffices. I would personally still add the 3+ digit unique number to the permalinks and eventually if necessary remove it once rankings improve overall on Google News. Some Back Story ================== I consulted for a Movie News and Review website for about 6 years. We had news sitemaps and would show up on Google News once in a while, but one of the small yet significant changes that we made that increased ranking on Google News was when we implemented adding a unique number to urls. That was implemented back around 2009-2010. We stopped using that unique numbers in the URL around 2013, mostly because the numbers were becoming pretty darn big. We noticed a small downtrend in Google News traffic which stabilized in a couple of months. For anyone using Wordpress unique numbers can be added using a permalink structure such as: /%postname%-%post_id%/ If you do decide to use it don't forget to setup 301 redirects.

franze 12y ago
which would not fulfill (the basically deprecated) three digit spec for the first 99 posts (maybe even the first 100). also it makes the URL longer, less user friendly and you have to deal with an URL migration that you might have to revert at some point (i.e.: the example you mentioned) additionally: as it is mentioned that the 3 digit requirement is "waived" with a google news sitemap it is a strong indicator that this is a crawling, not a ranking directive. my 2 cents: don't do it, as it would be a clear violation of the golden URL rule a.k.a. "Don't overdo the f###### URLs!"