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Site no longer indexed by Google News Report abuse

jfellows
Level 1
1/11/10
Hi, 

Our newspaper's website, www.fcnp.com is no longer being indexed by Google News. It look like this has happened around April-May of 2009. Since, we are a very popular site, and receive a lot of traffic, I didn't realize until just recently that we had been delisted.

We are a professional news organization, the newspaper of record for Falls Church City, Virginia, and cover the entire Northern Virginia and Washington D.C. area. We had been listed on Google News for years (our paper is almost 20 years old) and this sudden removal is very troubling and puzzling. 

Is this just a technical problem with the website or something else?

Thanks for your help.

Replies 1 - 15 of 15

methode
Top Contributor
1/12/10
Hi,

Could you login to Webmaster Tools and in the diagnostics section look for any News specific issue, please?
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jfellows
Level 1
1/12/10
Hi, thanks for the quick response.

What I'm seeing is that under News Specific, it says News = "No" for all my articles and the detail is "Article too long".

I don't understand how that could be-- the articles range from 300-1000 words. For example, here's a link to a couple articles that were deemed too long:

http://www.fcnp.com/news/5533-vice-mayor-lippman-recounts-his-latest-trip-to-afghanistan.html

http://www.fcnp.com/news/5581-falls-church-city-schools-open-2-hours-late.html

Thanks so much for your help!
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methode
Top Contributor
1/12/10
Well, saying the second article is too long is an insult.
What have you changed, if anything on your site's layout?
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jfellows
Level 1
1/12/10
Nothing that I can think of.

It really is puzzling. 

I've resubmitted the site to Google News but have yet to hear back. It's obviously being indexed, but why not by News is really troubling. Especially since we are a newspaper and have been for 20 years.

Any other suggestions?
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jfellows
Level 1
1/12/10
Actually, I take that back.. We did change a template on our site, and with that change, the titles of each individual article were "clickable." (I saw another thread where it you said titles should not be clickable). 

I did change the titles back to being unclickable this past weekend. Do you think that could be the problem? If so, how long would it take for the articles to become indexed again?

Thanks again for your help.
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methode
Top Contributor
1/12/10
Well, the template change is the issue. Please follow this link and report the update of your layout: http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py?contact_type=report_update

Have a great day!
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jfellows
Level 1
1/12/10
Should I fill out the update even though I just resubmitted my site for index a few days ago?
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jfellows
Level 1
1/13/10
I am still having issues with Google News indexing my site.  For instance, if perform a search of google news, it shows articles and updates from last week, but none of the new news articles that have been posted in the past  couple of days. Why is this?

It really hurts our site as, the search terms that should be producing our stories are instead, only showing other local blog results. I can't find reason why a blog would produce results when a newspaper does not.

Here is a link to our site's Google News results: (latest result is Jan 6)

http://news.google.com/news/search?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=site:www.fcnp.com&cf=all&scoring=n

And here is where our stories should be showing:

http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=falls+church


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Inbal
Google Employee
1/13/10
Hi jfellows,

It appears that the article body that we extracted from your HTML page appears to be too long to be a news article. We generated the "Article too long" error to avoid including what might be an incorrect piece of text. Common causes include news articles that contain user-contributed comments below the article, or HTML layouts that contain other material besides the news article itself. 

I've updated your site's information in our system. We should begin to crawl more articles from your site within a few weeks.

~ Inbal
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jfellows
Level 1
1/13/10
Hi Inbal, thank you for the response.

I'm puzzled by the "Article too long" error. Like I stated before, that error is showing up (when I look at webmaster tools > diagnostics > News specific section) even for this article:

http://www.fcnp.com/news/5581-falls-church-city-schools-open-2-hours-late.html

Surely, that article cannot be interpreted as too long. No comments below article too, just teases for other articles- but even that is not a large amount of text.



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Inbal
Google Employee
1/13/10
The article you've highlighted is undoubtedly NOT too long, but too short... 
Thanks for pinpointing this, our engineers will look into this mismatch, but please be assured that we should begin to crawl your articles that are indicated as "too long" within the next weeks.

~ Inbal


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jfellows
Level 1
1/13/10
No problem, thanks for helping out.. Though to let you know, it seems as if all of my articles regardless of the size were labeled "too long".
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Inbal
Google Employee
1/15/10
Hi jfellows,

I've consulted our engineers, who advised that this is happening because when we first crawled these articles, there was a "more news" section at the end of the article -- but later, you removed that section.  For example, for this article:
You may be able to see the original snapshot at the following Google cache link below.

Hope this helps,
Inbal

References:
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OTRSports
Level 1
1/30/10
Hi Inbal,

OTRSportsonline.com has had phenomenal Google News status for about 10 months now.  I recently lost my Google News status after we added some banner ads and were told that we needed to make our posts have a "click to continue reading" button and the rest of the post would be after the jump.  This is when we lost our status.  Was it because of the "click to continue reading" buttons?  Personally, I hate them, but was told by the ad network that we needed them.

I re-submitted our site to Google News and then saw today that I can submit that we updated the site.  I did that too, not sure if I was supposed to.  Do you know which of these variable caused us to lose our Google News ranking?  I got rid of the "click to continue reading" buttons.

We have a good number of readers, but losing Google News has hurt tremendously.  Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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OTRSports
Level 1
1/30/10
But my older stuff still comes out up top.  In Google News, a search for "soccer player shot in head" and we come up #1.  Nice to know that stuff wasn't affected.
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