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News (publishers) Help

Technical Requirements: Article URLs

In order to be included in Google News, your articles URLs should meet the following guidelines:

Be unique. Each of your pages that display an article's full text needs to have a unique URL. We can't include sites in Google News that display multiple articles under one URL, or that do not have links to pages dedicated solely to each article.

Be permanent. For example, we wouldn't be able to crawl the page www.yoursite.com/news1.html if it displayed a different story every day. In order to ensure that our links to articles function properly, each article on a news site needs to be associated with one unique URL, and that URL must be permanent (i.e., it can't be recycled).

Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For example, we can't crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html. We can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html. Keep in mind that if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html, we won't be able to crawl it. Please note, this rule is waived with News sitemaps.

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