Welcome everyone to today's Google Webmaster Central and Google News office hours Hangouts. We have Stacie with us, who's going to present something to you and help answer your Google News specific questions. STACIE CHAN: OK. Great. Thanks so much, John. Good morning, good afternoon,good evening, everyone, depending on wherein the world you are. The Google News team isvery excited that all of you are joining us. And again, we thank theWebmaster Tools team for letting us be a guest appearance again in your Office Hours. For those of you who didjoin the first one where Google News presented,that was much more of an introductory overview. Today's presentationis primarily going to focus on the new Google News Publisher Center, which is a very exciting tool forour team to enable publishers to glean a lot more information a bout how their information is being used by ourGoogle News team. So John, could you bringup the presentation? Excellent. All right. So like I said,today we're going to be focusing on how to use theGoogle News Publisher Center. I'm Stacie Chan. I'm the communitymanager for Google News. And there's my Twitter handleif you feel so inclined to tweet during this presentation. OK.
Great. Next slide, please, John. All right. So what is the GoogleNews Publisher Center? We developed thistool back in August because we had heardfrom publishers that they felt that we weren'tbeing as transparent as we possibly could. So this tool is reallythe one-stop shop for publishers to managetheir accounts in Google News. So you can do things likequickly and easily updating your site'sinformation, and we felt that this tool isextremely important to help us better improve thediscovery and classification of your news content. Barry's saying that you guyscan't see the presentation. OK. You guys can see it now. Great. Thumbs up from Barry. So largely since August whenthe Google News Publisher Center launch, we've gottenreally great feedback. We've seen a lot of usage fromover 60,000 publishers who are in the Google News database,because the Publisher Center is now available in everylanguage and country that Google News is in. So one testimonialfrom a publisher was, "Before thePublisher Center I had no idea what new sectionsGoogle News was crawling from. Now I'm assured thatmy articles are crawled and in the proper place." And that's a sentiment wehope that every publisher has. If you haven't checked out theGoogle News Publisher Center, please do. I will go over thosesteps and how to do so in the following slides. Next slide, please. So here's the URL. Hopefully you guys arewatching on a browser where you can open another tab. Please check it out. This is the screenshotthat you'll first see when you open upthis link, whether or not you're in Google News. So as you can see, I am theowner of staciechan.com, for example.
This is thescreenshot that I see. I have been a verifiedowner of staciechan.com. However, because that siteis not in Google News, it's clearly not anews site, you'll see that there's a buttonwhere I can actually request inclusion in Google News. And you'll seemore than one site if you own more than onesite in Webmaster Tools. And if your siteis in Google News, you'll actually see differentbuttons under that Details and Sections column. So next slide, please? This is what you seeactually when you click on the Details button. That image on the left will showvarious pieces of information. The four mostimportant components to be a site in Google Newsare your name, your site URL, your country, and your language. And the country andlanguage are really important for us todetermine which edition in Google News you should be. So, for example, an edition isthe Canadian-French edition, or the Canadian-English edition. It's always a combo of yoursite's country and language. Now moving to theright side, this is what you see when youclick on the Sections button in the Publisher Center. Your News sectionsare the different URLs where your news content lives. Usually those are just subdomains of your main site. Next slide, please? Another thing you can doin the Publisher Center is apply relevant labelsat the source level and at the section level. What the sourcelevel labels tell us is what type of site asa whole your new site is. So, for example, ifyour site is a blog you'll usually seea blog label there, or if you're a satiresite like "The Onion," that would get appliedto your whole site. Over on the right side,your section labels start getting alittle more granular. You apply labels toyour news sections. So you tell us ifthat FIFA World Cup site is a sports site. So it can help us betterclassify your news articles within the sectionsin Google News. And if you see at thetop of that image, there's a little buttonthat said Add Editors' Pick. I'll go over whatthat new feature is. Next slide, please? So Editors' Picks is avery, very cool feature, we think, on theGoogle News home page. It's actually myfavorite section because it's the onewidget on the home page where editors have completecontrol over what articles appear in their Editors' Picks. So that's why we call Editors'Picks your can't miss stories. Our team doesn't provideany editorial judgment on what appears in that widget. Those are completely selectedby your publications.
And it's up to fivearticles that you think deserve to be there. What we've heardfrom publishers is that these stories tend tobe the Evergreen stories, or the stories thatyou thought would have gotten a lot moretraffic yesterday, and you want to get moreclicks out of that story. So you put that inyour Editors' Picks. And we say potentially canappear on the home page because every home page, forevery user, looks different. Especially as moreand more users start to personalizetheir home pages. So, for example, thisis a screenshot of mine. "The New Yorker," forme, is a preferred source because I love reading them. And so as a user I've made "TheNew Yorker" a preferred source, so I'm much morelikely to see "The New Yorker's" Editors' Pickson my personal home page. Next slide, please? So now that I've explainedwhat Editors' Picks feeds are. How do you goabout creating one? And how do you goabout submitting one through the Publisher Center? So it's a very simple. It's just a standard RSS feedto create this Editors' Picks feed. We even have a templatein our Help Center that you can just copyand paste, and then substitute out those fivelinks to your articles. And again, it's fivehandpicked stories. The only requirementthat we ask is that they'rejournalistic articles, that they're not adsor spammy articles, or anything like that. And so I don't know if youcan copy and paste that link from a slide, but there it is. Or you can just visit theGoogle News Help Center and just search for Editors' Picks feed. And you can take a look at thestandard RSS feed template. OK. Next slide, please? So how to submit this. So, again, goingback to that screen shot from withinthe Publisher Center you would just click on theAdd Editors' Pick button. And you'll get either one oftwo messages after you copy and paste your RSS feed's URL. You'll get, congratulations,your Editors' Picks feed has been submitted successfully. And there's really nothing moreyou have to do on your end. You'll see your Editors'Picks feed listed as one of your news sections.
Or if you submit yourRSS feed and there are errors you'llget the message, unfortunately, thereare errors which will prevent your Editors'Picks feed from displaying. And then below you'll seea list of various errors that could possibly be wrong. OK. Next slide, please? And so I just wantedto share a case study from one publisher who didimplement Editors' Picks. The Gawker Team ownsnine different properties and the created anEditors' Picks feed from "Gizmodo" to "Gawker" toall their other publications. And you can readthe article there. I included the link, butthe most intriguing thing for our team afterthey did this case study completely independently. They just shared it with us andwe thought it was really neat. There was an obviousincrease in traffic, so quantitatively thatwas a huge benefit. But also in thequality side they said that the traffic they weregetting from the Editors' Picks was much better. They found that alot of these readers were new readers to their site. And that these readers spent 60%longer reading their articles than their otherreaders who did not come through Editors' Picks. And the way we do that is onceyou create the Editors' Picks we'll actually appendthe CGI parameter for you at the end of all yourEditors' Picks article URLs. You'll see the direct trafficcoming from these five stories. Thank you, Barry, for listingthe help [INAUDIBLE] link to, I can't remember whicharticle I just mentioned, to the Editors' Picks feed. OK. Next slide, please? So the second partof the presentation is now that I've told youall these great things you can do within the PublisherCenter, how do you access this? So you go to thatlink, like I had mentioned in the otherslide, check it out. And the first step,next slide, please, is to make sure yoursite is in Google News. You can still access thatlink, as I showed you. I, as a personal individually,I'm not in Google News, but I could requestinclusion for staciechan.com if I wanted to. If you're not in GoogleNews, go ahead and apply. The second step is,next slide, please? You to verify ownership ofyour site in Webmaster Tools. You just go to that linkgoogle.com/webmasters/tools and you'll see the differentsites that you own. So you can see there,that would be a screen shot if I hadn't verifiedownership of staciechan.com. There's a neat little bluelink and the Webmaster team is very great about walkingyou through all the steps to verify ownership. The two methods thatGoogle News prefers are one, the domainname provider method, or secondly, the HTMLfile verification method. BARUCH LABUNSKI:But just the HTML verification, it's not thesame as the first one, right? Because when you submityour original websites in the Webmaster tools youget that HTML verification. It won't override the other onethat I have in the FTP, right? STACIE CHAN: That's agood question, Barry. So we prefer the domainname provider method because, in a sense, wewant you to prove ownership at the highest level. So you can prove ownershipof www.staciechan.com, but we reallyprefer you to prove ownership ofhttp://staciechan.com and then everything that fallsbelow that a subdomain level, you would then have access to. So, yes, those aren'texactly the same. We prefer in order that firstone, the domain name provider method. BARUCH LABUNSKI: OK. Thank you.
STACIE CHAN: Mhmm. OK. And number three. And then you just have to login with the same email account that you used to proveownership of your site in Webmaster Tools. So please check outthe Publisher Center and for the most part it'sa very self-serve tool. We hope to start overlayingmany, many more features in the Publisher Center. It's really thefoundation of how we view our communicationswith all the publishers that are in Google News. So we have more featurescoming down the pipeline. Nothing I can announce publiclyyet, but stay tuned for more. And I believe I haveone more slide, John. Ah, OK. And there's a fewmore help resources in case you guys haveany further questions, or you want to do a littlemore light bedtime reading. The Help Center is a treasuretrove of information. I highlighted those twosections that have information specifically about the PublisherCenter that you can read more. The Google News help forum. You can find meon there, as well as our Google Newstop contributors, who are our experts. They're daily answeringmany of your questions, as well as just havinglively discussions, too. Feel free to post anythingabout Google News. You can suggest productimprovements, or feature suggestions, prettymuch anything. And then finally,last slide, I believe. Just want to give a quick plugfor our Google News Newsletter. We actually sent out theinaugural newsletter last month in January, which featured anintroduction to the Publisher Center, much of the sameinformation that is actually in this presentation,but also product updates, like, we'll actually crawlyour off domain images now. We talked about Editors' Picks. And we're actually gettingready for our second Google News Newsletter, which we'resending out probably in Q2, early April, around there. So we highly suggestthat you read it. There are a few ways youcan get it in your inbox. The first one is to,one, make sure your site is on Google News, and toactually get it to your inbox you have to prove ownership ofyour site in Webmaster Tools, similar to the step that Idetailed about getting access to your Publisher Center. And don't worry. Even if your site isnot in Google News we post the Newsletter in theHelp Center and the forum, so you can still readall of that information. The last Newsletter thatwe sent out in January was only in English,French, Italian, and German. This newsletter,we're going to try to translate into many,many more languages so we can reach as many of ourpublishers as we possibly can. [INAUDIBLE], youwant it in Russian. All right. We'll try to do Russian as well. OK. So that about wraps upthe presentation portion, so we can open itup to questions, but I did get a great questionfrom a publisher in Vancouver that I quicklywanted to go over. She was asking, and John canprobably help me out with this, she was asking about the errorsthat you see in your Webmaster Tools account.
This is probably the goto place to determine if one of your newsarticles wasn't crawled. We'll actually list thespecific URL and what error it generates. And she was asking if wecould surface those errors in a more timely matter. But, in reality, those errorsare surfaced in pretty much as real time as it gets. We generate those errorsbased on the articles that you submitin your site map. So we really can't getthose errors much faster. John, did you have any othercomment about those errors? JOHN MUELLER: Yeah. I think the SiteMaps team this is really good at processingthe Site Maps files and finding errors inthe Site Map files. And bringing that up,essentially as quickly as possible. So that's kind of a greatplace to get that information. STACIE CHAN: Oh, and Johnactually mentioned a good point to me and our Google News team. You could have an error on everysingle one of your articles. That doesn't penalizeor do anything of that sort to your siteas a whole, right, John? JOHN MUELLER: Yeah. So this is a commonquestion we get from Webmasters, in particular,is I have 10,000 crawl errors on my website. Is this a problem or not? And in general, if theseare crawl errors for URLs that you don't wantto have indexed, then that's perfectly fine. And that won't negativelyaffect the rest of your website's ranking. So just because you have someparts of your site with errors, those are specific tothose individual URLs. They wouldn't be affecting therest of your site's ranking. STACIE CHAN: Great. Thanks, John. OK. So I think that was theonly question that I got personally ahead of time. So happy to open it up. I think, John, that's whereyou manage the questions. JOHN MUELLER: All right. I think there were someGoogle News questions that were submitted in the Q&A. Letme try to run through them. I don't know if I willsurprise you with these. We'll see. Does Google News useschema.org markup in any way? STACIE CHAN: How do you mean? Can you clarify thatquestion in any way? During the extractionand crawl process? JOHN MUELLER: Yeah. So Let's see. The rest of the question here,is my observations indicate that it doesn't. I see article two long errorsand news box crawl errors even though the title, headline,actual article body are marked by schema.org/articlemarkup. So using structured data markupto essentially define which part of the page the article. STACIE CHAN: That'sa very good question. I think it really variesarticle by article. I'm not sure whoasked that question, but happy to take that offlineand work with you individually, and take a look at your site. JOHN MUELLER: That mightalso be something, I guess, that he could postin the forum and-- STACIE CHAN: Yes. I would actually be great. Thanks for the reminder, John. BARRY: There's alsocontent, specifically my site, that Ispecifically do not include in the sitemap for the news feed because I don'tlike getting recaps. And they also come up inthe Google News site errors, crawl errors as RO fragmented orhave problems with the article. I specifically do not want themto be included in Google News, but the Google Webmastercrawl errors page shows news errors for it whenit shouldn't be included. Is there a way toexclude content from Google News whereit doesn't show up in Google Webmaster tools? STACIE CHAN: Is there a wayto exclude Google News content so it doesn't show upon Webmaster Tools? So really wherewe're crawling from are those new sections that youlist in the Publisher Center. I think whatpublishers sometimes forget is that we'll crawlalmost everything on the page. So a lot of publishersthink that, well, I listed the home URLon xyz.com/business, but there's a lot of other linkson that xyz.com/business that may not be a news articlethat we'll attempt to extract. So I think publishersshould be very careful about what articles theyinclude in each section, but that's why youcan also use robots, because we realizea news section isn't going to be 100% news articles. We want the pageto be very robust with all sorts of content. And we completely get that. So robots is a very safe way toexclude that non-news content that you don't wantshowing up in Google News. Or you could always usesite map only crawl, which is also equally accepted. BARRY: Site map only crawl? STACIE CHAN: Yes. Instead of listing allof your news sections in the PublisherCenter you can tell us that you only want us tocrawl articles from your site map, not news sections at all. And you can actually do thatthrough the Publisher Center by contacting usbecause then we'll have to then notethat you want to only be crawled from your site map. You can submit a site mapthrough your Webmaster Tools account I we'll crawl that inaddition to your news sections, but if you're reallyconcerned that we're crawling non-newscontent, I would suggest submitting asite map and letting us know that you want usto only crawl the articles from that site map. AUDIENCE: Will do. Thank you. JOHN MUELLER: OK. Can a press release bepicked up by Google News? STACIE CHAN: Yes, apress release can, but only if the pressreleases lives on a site that is in Google News. And we do acceptpress release sites. You even saw from ascreenshot on a slide during the presentation. That is a label thatwe have for sources. So the short answer is yes. We don't allow individualarticles to be crawled though. So if you're a PRagency that is trying to get a press releasecirculated on Google News you have to actually have awebsite that is first accepted. JOHN MUELLER: OK. Here's one about the site maps.
The unknown new site errorin news XTML Site Maps tab keeps popping up forseveral of my sites and disappears when I resubmit. All the site names arematched to their names in the Google News database. Is this a known bug? STACIE CHAN: No,it's not a known bug. We do get this error a lotof times from publishers. I would have to take alook at your exact site, but we did addressthe main cause of this for most publishers is thatthe name doesn't match the name that we have in our database. But the great news iswith the Publisher Center it's so much easier for you nowas a publisher to check what name we have on file for you. You log into thePublisher Center. You make sure that thename in our database matches the nameon your site map. The URL also hasto match exactly. The URL of your site mapalso has to match exactly. So even a discrepancy in thewww will make a difference. And it'll say that thename on your site map doesn't match the name thatwe have in our database. The other two things thathave to match exactly are your language and country. So those fourcriteria have to match exactly what's on your sitemap and what's in our database. That's the most common error. Other than that, if you'restill finding the error, please write in to our teamand we can take a look at that. JOHN MUELLER: OK. Let's see. We have one here. In the Google NewsPublisher Help it suggested that publishersdon't use date or time in their headlines. Is this referring to numericdigits or an actual date/time? Is a year or a monetarydigit in the title OK? Is the issue withdigits to the URL? STACIE CHAN: Interesting. I'm trying to pull up thatpage to see the exact verbiage. We don't have anyeditorial guidelines. The last thing wewant to do is tell you how to write your headlines. From a user perspective, Isee the year in headlines all the time. "The TopStories of 2014," I've seen that in GoogleNews hundreds of times. So that's definitelynot a problem. Having years or datesin the URL should not be a problem in termsof article extraction. In fact, we dorequire that you have a unique set of at least threedigits in your article URLs in order for us to crawl it. That's what we callthe three digit rule. So if you wanted to ping,I think I closed the chat. Where did it go? If you would like to add theURL to that Help Center article I can take a look at it. Or again, write in tome, write into our team, and I can provide somefurther details on that. JOHN MUELLER:
All right. That kind of leadsinto the next question. Here we go. How do you write in tothe Google News team? How do you contact you guys? STACIE CHAN: Excellent question. So within the HelpCenter there's a tiny Contact Us buttonin the top right corner. And then it just leadsthrough a series of drop-downs so we can helpcategorize your issue. And myself, or a member ofour team will get back to you. But really the quickestway to get an answer is through the forum. Our TCs, shout out to ourwonderful top contributors who are our product experts,will probably get back to you a lot faster than my team orI would in absolute candor. So you can also try theGoogle News Help Forum. Let me actually just put alink in the Hangout chat box. OK. So that's the GoogleNews Forum link. JOHN MUELLER: OK. I'll copy the URLs into thevideo description afterwards. STACIE CHAN: Oh, great. Thank, John. JOHN MUELLER: So that they'rekind of visible there. Oh, wow. The questions keepbumping around. Could you please clarify whymy website coinspeaker.com was rejected in Google News? We're working very hard to makeit one of the best bitcoin news websites of the world. Where can I get help? STACIE CHAN: The old, why wasmy site rejected question. Obviously, it's very mucha case by case basis. And just as the newsindustry is involving in what it considers a news site. Google News is closelymonitoring that, making some really toughdecisions on what sites are included and which sites aren't. Probably not the exact venueto go over your specific site, but for those specificquestions actually, the forum is really the bestspot to get specific advice. For kind of policy reasons,the Google News Team doesn't providevery specific advice because we found thatin the past publishers would latch on to the littledetails that we suggest and then say, OK, well Ifixed that or edited that. Now I can be acceptedinto Google News? It's a ton ofdifferent criteria that goes into accepting orrejecting a Google News site. But in the forum the topcontributors and anyone really can chime in andprovide some really, really detailedsolid advice for how to improve the quality ofyour site, and possibly get it accepted into Google News. BARUCH LABUNSKI: Butbrands can get accepted if they want to, right? If they have some reallyserious journalistic authors, or, let's say, helpingsmall businesses and so on. Would that be something? I mean, can a sitelike that get accepted? STACIE CHAN: Did you say brands? I missed the firstpart of your question. BARUCH LABUNSKI: Let's saya brand has a blog, right, which you can accept. Can a brand also be accepted? [INAUDIBLE] STACIE CHAN: Right. And a lot of timeswe find that there are companies or brandsthat are very much experts in certain fields or industries. And that they do providefantastic quality news content. So what we'll do is we'llaccept their news sections. And we really askthat publishers respect that, thatthey don't add their, I don't know, sales page,or other non-news sections to the Publisher Center. And there is frequentchecks to make sure that only news contentis crawled and indexed in Google News. BARUCH LABUNSKI: OK. I mean, it's news,but at the same time I'm still seeing some newskind of act like blogs. I mean, it's notnecessarily news.
STACIE CHAN: Baruch, thisis a fun back and forth. I think you ask every singleperson in this Hangout what is news, andwhether a certain site should be acceptedinto Google News, you'll probably get11 different opinions. And that's what makes my jobso interesting but also really challenging. We accept blogs in Google News. We think they're greatsources of information. They may not be definedas a news site for you, or for me, or for anothermember on my team, but blogs, we foundin this day and age, in this stage ofGoogle News, that they provide valuable informationto readers [INAUDIBLE] Google News. BARUCH LABUNSKI: Thank youso much for the question. Thanks. STACIE CHAN: Sure. JOHN MUELLER: All right. Barry, you had a question. BARRY: Yeah. So on that topic aboutsites that might not consider to be news, usingthe Editors' Picks for that, I'm always cautiousabout ever even using it because I don't think that theaverage people are interested in if John's saying thatlink building should be dead, or alive, or whatever,I don't think, even though it's a huge topicfor the search engine marketing community, it's something thataverage people don't really care about when ISIS is outthere and stuff like that. So what do publishers that arecovering a very niche topic, should they stay away fromusing the Editors' Pick? Or what do you recommend? STACIE CHAN: I always hesitateto give editorial advice, but I can speak more onthe quantitative side, what we see in terms of traffic,if you want potentially more traffic to your site, werecommend using Editors' Picks. If you like potentiallyconverting new users to your site, we recommendusing Editors' Picks. And that's why I wanted touse the case study of Gawker. They're a pretty bigmedia organization. They still found a lot of newusers coming to their site. And what we tellpublishers is that the best way to get in front of newusers is to do Editors' Picks. The best way to builda more loyal following amongst your existing usersis to create an Editors' Picks and then educate people onhow they see the publishers Editors' Picks more often. How you do that is youpersonalize your Google News homepage. So I used myself as an example. I love "The New Yorker" soI personalized my homepage to make "The New Yorker"a preferred source. So that every time I log intoGoogle News on my home page, I am much more likelyto see "The New Yorker's" Editors' Picks widget. So it's really anotherfeature you can add to your editorial strategy. We know there's a lot ofthose out there, not even from Google orGoogle News, but we think that it really doesprovide a lot of value to our publishers. BARRY: Thank you. JOHN MUELLER: All right. Mihai, I think you hada question, too, right? MIHAI APERGHIS: Yeah. Hey, Stacie. I'm working with a fairly bigpublisher in the United States and before the GoogleNews, the dashboard, basically the publisher hasa news section and a reviews section. And although thereviews are usually of products in theirniche that are a review, so they cover a review ofproducts recently bought, for example. They decided not to implementthose in the news site map, just to be sure there weren'tany issues with Google not accepting them. So we only added the newssection covering events and such relevant to the niche. So when the-- whatwas it called? The dashboard, the Google News-- STACIE CHAN: ThePublisher Center. MIHAI APERGHIS:Publisher Center. OK. So when the PublisherCenter was launched I noticed that thewebsite was included and the news sectionwas the one that was featured in the section.
Well, not really anissue, but what I noticed was that the GoogleNews bot was also crawling some ofthe reviews articles and featuring themin Google News. So those were outsidethe news section. And I really didn'tknow what to do exactly. I asked on the help forum. So I decided in the endto also add the reviews as a section in thePublishers Center. I guess this also is relatedto what is action news, but since most of the reviewsare related to new products, so it's basically op-ed pieces. Is that fine? And what's also, as aseparate different question, would it be necessary toinclude a separate site map for each section, or woulda single site map be sufficient. STACIE CHAN: That'sa great question. So the first part, the reviewsquestion is very tricky. Again, I think if youasked every single person, is a review news, I think itdepends on a lot of factors. I think if it's a very timelyreview of the iPhone 6, I think a lot of us wouldagree that that is news. I actually just founda link to the forum discussing this very topic. And I think for themost part people agreed that reviews,if timely, are news. It's a very tough question. You did mention the op-ed tag. I think if it's a review,that would definitely be an opinion piece. And applying theop-ed label would be very appropriate to that. To your second question, canyou submit a site map, yes. You can submit as manynews site maps as you like. You would just do thatthrough your Webmaster Tools. But keep in mind if you wantus to do a site map only crawl, where we only pullarticles from your site map-- I have tosee if we would be able to crawl more than onesite map if it is a site map only crawl. But you can submitas many site maps to your Webmaster Tools account. MIHAI APERGHIS:Well, currently we added reviews sectionin the site map as well. But my question was reallyif a publisher notices that some of the articles thatweren't included in the news site map were featuredon Google News, should he go ahead usuallyin Publisher Center and add that part of hiswebsite as a section? If he notices thatGoogle already features some of the[INAUDIBLE] from that section. STACIE CHAN: Yes. You can add that section. I think unless youfind that there's so many articles on thatsection that are not news, don't add that. But you should add thatsection and appropriately apply the op-ed label. And that's where we reallydo use those labels. A question that we getfrom publishers is, well, didn't Google News already knowhow to classify my articles? Yes and no. I think adding that sectionto the Publisher Center and applying that op-edlabel to your review section will really help the productbetter classify your news articles. MIHAI APERGHIS: OK. ROBERT: Stacie, doesGoogle follow the RSS feeds to find some of that news? STACIE CHAN: Yes andyou can add RSS feeds. I haven't thought aboutthose in a long time. But yes. You can add RSS feeds toyour Publisher Center. ROBERT: OK. JOHN MUELLER: All right. There's still someGoogle News questions. Does a text versus HTML coderatio affect Google News? Like if you have more textor more HTML code on a page, does that changeanything for Google News? STACIE CHAN: Versus imagesor things like that? Sorry, I don't where thequestions are appearing. JOHN MUELLER: Somore like if you have a lot of markup on yourpages, and very little text, or if you have a lot of textand very minimalistic markup, does that change anything? STACIE CHAN: I can onlyspeak in terms of extraction. That's hard tosay, more or less. We do have certain rules forthe minimum amount of text that you should haveand the maximum amount. That is listed inour Help Center. Let me just ping thepage on the chat window. It's such anambiguous definition of more or less than Iprobably can't quantify it, but I will ping somedefinitions that'll be helpful in answeringthat question. JOHN MUELLER: OK, here'sanother one from India. Recently I get approvalfor our tech news website. Since its country isIndia, but our team also covers US tech updates,but our website never gets ranked in the USedition of Google News. So is there somethingthat they could do there, or that they'rebasically stuck in India. STACIE CHAN: Very good question. I went over in thepresentation two criteria that are very importantfor us to determine which edition your site isin, the country and language. If you do feel thatyou have a very big US audience, or a bigFrench audience and you want tochange that country, you would actually haveto apply for inclusion for that specific site. And you would have to havea separate URL for that because we can'textract articles and say, oh, this shouldgo in the US edition, or this should go inthe India edition. So your site could bexyz.com/us and xyz.com/india. And you would have tohave two separate accounts in Google News with us. MIHAI APERGHIS: And does yourtargeting in Webmaster Tools affect that in anyway, or is it just useful for normalsearch results? STACIE CHAN: Mihai, areyou asking would you have to do anythingdifferently in Webmaster Tools if you were to dothat in Google News? JOHN MUELLER: I think thegeo-targeting setting is only for web search, notfor Google News. So it doesn'tselect which edition it's shown in Google News. MIHAI APERGHIS: Since you talkedabout the minimum and maximum amount of text required forinclusion in Google News, talking about those op-edpieces or reviews, some of them can usually go fairlylong, so what's your recommendation about that? Should we maybe break itup into multiple articles or just not bother with it? STACIE CHAN: I'm justlooking at our page. We actually don't have aword count limit for article too long. I don't know if I've ever seenan op-ed piece that was so long that we couldn't-- I can imagineop-ed piece just as a reader being that long where GoogleNews couldn't extract and index it. You could breakit up into pieces.
As a former journalistI often do that with a lot of my articles, justbecause it was a better reader experience. Without seeing aspecific article I can't really commenton a max word length, if or if not itcould be crawled. We do have a word countminimum, that you do need. Yeah. Your articles have tobe more than 80 words, but that's really ouronly concrete word count requirement. BARUCH LABUNSKI: Last time Ichecked, the NASA articles, they're around 600, 700, so. MIHAI APERGHIS: Iwas asking because I think I did get a few errorsthat the article, there was too much text on that page. That the article was too long. And it wasn't thenews site map, and I think I got theerror displayed right there, if I remember correctly. So can see that [INAUDIBLE]. The article was too long. STACIE CHAN: Onething that we do see is that the articletoo long error will often get generatedbecause of user comments. It's not necessarily the words,or the text that's too long, but it thinks thewhole page is too long, not necessarily thecontent of your article. And so there are a fewthings that you could do. You could isolateyour user comments. You could put them in an iframe. That's the easiestrecommendation that we have, but most of thetime, it really isn't about the text of yourarticle that's too long. MIHAI APERGHIS: So theDisqus commenting system, would you haverecommendations for that? I'm not sure how Googlemanages crawling. STACIE CHAN: That'sa good question because I know a lot ofpublishers do you Disqus. I would have totake a look at that. I haven't seen anarticle recently that generated that errorfrom Disqus comments, but good question. I'll get back to you on that. JOHN MUELLER: All right. Olaf has a question. OLAF: Hi, thanks. My question is aboutdates in articles. There's a recommendationin the Help Center that it says you shouldn't havemore than one date in the HTML code. It's here. And now our editorsare more and more often update the informationin articles. Maybe somethinglike a live blog, where you are live blogging thewhole day or longer about very special events. And so they want to makevisible for our readers when they published it,and when they edited it. Is that a problemfor Google News? STACIE CHAN: I seewhat you're saying. So now it's actuallyin the HTML code. Just quickly scanningthat article. We really ask publishersto include the date when the articlewas first published. I do see what you'resaying because in this day and age with internet you canconstantly update information to that article. And so we get alot of questions, should we put the dateof the most recent edit? We're still asking to put thedate when the article first appeared on your site. Putting more than one datereally does confuse the bot and that's why people will askus, why does my article say, crawled two, three hours ago. It's not exactly when myarticle was first published. It's just a verytricky thing to get exactly right because thelife cycle of an article is constantly changing. So to reduceconfusion for the bot we ask to include the dateof when the article was first published. OLAF: OK. Thanks. STACIE CHAN: Usually, I rememberwhat I did as a journalist. I would just put it inthe text of the article, like updated at thistime and this date, but really messing withthe HTML code or editing it can potentially getconfusing for the bot. OLAF: By HTML code, do youthen meet what's in the header? STACIE CHAN: Yes. OLAF: OK. So it's not regarding the body. STACIE CHAN: I mean, that's moreof an editorial thing, right? We will never tell you whenyou should write, and update, or edit in the body article. But in your headeryou should really put when the articlewas first published. OLAF: Sure. JOHN MUELLER: OK. We have a question from Jane. Is it better to have thetitle and the H1 content be different, so the H1 heading? Google News indicated no,but some SEOs yes, they should be different. Is this just a matter of thealgorithm being different for Google Searchand Google News? STACIE CHAN: I can onlyspeak to Google News. John, you might be able tospeak more about Google Search. Consistency is key. One thing we alwaystry to get right is extracting your headline. And if there aredifferent places on the page that pointto different headlines, that's very confusingfor the bot. And that's why we get publisherssometimes writing in, like, oh, you guys gotmy headline wrong. And we'll say, well,because there's different parts of your pagethat say different things. So really tryingto be consistent is the best way for us tocorrectly index your headline. And then that snippet below. I can't commenton the SEO stuff, but if you're trying to signalto us that your article is about certain things, Ibelieve we have things you can add in the meta tag. Is it key words? I believe you can stilluse the keywords tag if you wanted to signal other topicsthat you article was about, but please forconsistency's sake, I would ask that thetitles and the headlines remain the same wherever you'repointing to on your page. JOHN MUELLER: All right. That kind of leadsto the next question. Can you provide anyadditional guidance on using the newskeywords tag, specifically is it used for directquery matching, or is it also usedfor classification? Any advice around that? STACIE CHAN: And Imentioned the keywords tag. And I probably shouldn'thave because I'm not super expert on that. We do have a HelpCenter page about that. Let's see. We don't explain explicitly. I can actuallydig more into that and see if there are any updatesto the key words Help Center page, and then I'llpost that as a comment to this recordingof the Hangout. JOHN MUELLER: All right. We have one about duplicatecontent, which we always kind of have. I'm concerned about duplicatecontent, both cross-channel between our subdomains andexternal as applied by news agencies such as Reuters, AFP. At this point a rel canonicalis not feasible to pull off, so what would you recommendin a situation like that. STACIE CHAN: Darn it. Stole my suggestion.
That's a very complex question. We get that frompublishers a lot, but it's such a complexnetwork now with news now living on the internet. Really the rel canonical tagis what our team currently believes is the bestway to handle all that. And I don't know whatcontractual agreements you sometimes have withyour syndication partners. It really depends,but the best way is just to pick that mainpublication that should deserve the credit for theirreporting or their article, and point to that news site. JOHN MUELLER: All right. Another one about news. Is it necessary to occasionallyuse third-party standouts in order for your ownstandouts to carry any weight? STACIE CHAN: Oh, great question. Yes. The standout tag is built onthe ecosystem of publishers using the standout tag. So in a sense you canbuild up credibility using a standout tagand referring to xyz.com rather than always referringto your site abc.com. The only thing we ask isthat you use the standout tags for your own siteonly seven times per week, but really you can link out toas many other third-party sites with a standout tag asfrequently as you would like. In fact, we encourage it. JOHN MUELLER: All right. There's a bunch ofstuff in the chat here. I don't know. Do any of you guys have anynews-related questions left? MIHAI APERGHIS: I haveone about news site maps. Can you clarify if you usenews site maps on anything other than allowing Webmasterto check for any errors? Since I noticed you sometimescrawl outside the news site maps. So is it used for anything elsethan updating the Webmaster if it has any issues? STACIE CHAN: Notthat I can think of. John, if you wantedto add anything, but it's acts likeanother news section, at least to the Google News bot. The only time it'svery important is if you decide to doa site map only crawl. Then that's exclusively wherewe're pulling articles from. JOHN MUELLER: So I guess justfrom the site map side, that's almost the fastest way to getcontent to Google, in the sense that if we see it in asite map, you tell us about the change in your sitemap, and we pick that up, then we can jump andgo to the server. And pick that up directlyand see what happened there. What changed, which pagesare new, and follow that up directly. So I've seen situations whereWebmasters submit a site map file, and aftertwo, three minutes the URLs are already indexed. So that's really fast trackway into Google's index almost. STACIE CHAN: Gotcha. OK. That's [INAUDIBLE] speed. Yeah, that is a big benefitof submitting a site map. BARUCH LABUNSKI: Arewe allowed to talk about [INAUDIBLE] for a minute? It's about mobile. JOHN MUELLER: I have the nextnormal Webmasters Central Hangouts lined up next. So I'd recommenddeferring it until there because we don'thave much time left. And I think there's stillsome questions here. [INAUDIBLE] has a question aboutcompany press release sites, English and French. Do they need to register twice? STACIE CHAN: Yes,if by registering you mean apply to Google News. So again, if at any point yourcountry or language is not just one country or onelanguage, then yes. You do need to applyto Google News. MALE SPEAKER: But theURL is the same for both. STACIE CHAN: Was that a commentor a question that I heard. ROBERT: Stacie I justwanted to add just for the viewers on thekeywords you mentioned a while ago, the tagfor the meta tag, don't get them confused withthe old meta keywords tag. It's a News keywords tag.
STACIE CHAN: Robert. I just saw your-- Robert,I appreciate that. Yes. I'll provide some educationand language about that when I get up to date. Oh, OK. So the clarifyingquestion was the URL's the same for both countries. Yes. So we'll actually needthen a separate URL. So, again, you'll needxyz.com/fr and xyz.com/en. JOHN MUELLER: OK. Here's a quick questionabout site map index files. Chris uses a site map indexfile that has a Google News site map within it. It shows on GoogleNews as submitted and the websitesubmitted, but it doesn't show them asindexed, though they show up in Google News. So if the index count inWebmaster Tools for Google News site map doesn't showup, is that a problem? STACIE CHAN: John and Iwere just discussing this before the Hangout actually. The index count isn't alwaysaccurate for Google News specifically. It's just a differentbeast, I would say. News articles arebeing indexed so much faster than a lotof regular sites that it's very hard toaccurately capture that. So the best way that werecommend to see which articles are being indexed is just asimple site search in Google News, and then you'll see whicharticles are being crawled and which ones aren't. BARRY: I have a questionabout the video channels sections in GoogleNews Publisher Center. For some reason itsays that I have a YouTube channel in my source. And the only way I could changeit is to contact support. Do you guys handle YouTubeURLs for sources for-- STACIE CHAN: Good question. Yeah. So because YouTube.comis not technically owned under your domain, youcan't add that section to your Publisher Center. So to add a YouTubechannel you still need to write in to our team. BARRY: And that would link mysite to that YouTube channel, and it'll be onthe same publisher? That's how it works? STACIE CHAN: Yeah. So it would showsearch and round table for any videos thatappear in Google News once your YouTube channelis linked to your account. BARRY: Cool. Thanks. BARUCH LABUNSKI:So then it would be treated like a blog,or whatever, right? So if you-- STACIE CHAN: No. I mean, it wouldn't betreated any differently than an article on your site. The placementwould be different. So your videos would likelyappear in the media strip below the text articles, butyou would get the same name. We don't have a label becauseit appears in the media strip. And it wouldn't say anythinglike blog by the video. It would just be thename of your publication. BARUCH LABUNSKI: OK. JOHN MUELLER: All right. Looks like we're out of time. I bet we could go on for hours. Lots of good GoogleNews questions here. Thank you all foryour time so far. And thank you, Stacie,for all of the details, and answers, andthe presentation. STACIE CHAN: Absolutely. And to hold meaccountable, I would love to host another one soon. So I'll work withJohn to hopefully get another guest appearance spoton your guys' Office Hours. These are reallyfun and, I think, hopefully informationaland educational. JOHN MUELLER: All right. Thanks a lot. And with that, I wishyou all a great day. And maybe we'll see youagain next time, Stacie, or another time. STACIE CHAN: All right. Thanks, everyone. Bye. JOHN MUELLER: Bye. MIHAI APERGHIS: Bye.
