Google News - getting harder to be syndicated?

For some reason, for the past two years I’ve taken it on board to develop a whole string of news site.

I figure it’s partly because I have a closet desire to be a newspaper publisher for real - it was one of my dreams even before I’d heard of the internet.

The other reason is that while some people are programming wizards who can built solid revenue streams from innovative coding techniques, my own strength lays with publishing information. It’s what I always did before my internet interests became commercial, and as someone with a strong writing background, it’s something I can really push myself into.

Therefore developing news sites seemed a perfectly sensible option. Sensible in that it worked with my strengths - but not so sensible in that there’s no revenue model attached. I figure invest now and worry about that later.

However, when Google announced Google Universal in May, and it become known that news sites syndicated by Google News would be treated as a quality signal, I knew there’d be a rash of people trying to get sites into Google News.

Previous to that, if you submitted a site for syndication, Google would either reply that you’d been included, and if not, they’d not only let you know why, but also give you a chance to explain whether the rejection was due to a misunderstanding (a common one was not clearly showing it was operated by a corporate entity).

It was one of the really great things about Google News - it was one area of Google where it wasn’t too hard to get a human answer, and additional, be able to explain a viewpoint for consideration.

Unfortunately, the move to Google Universal seems to have sent the spam spinning into the news team…

I made a very big mistake a few weeks back - I had a site just included, but then moved it to a new domain, redirecting all of the previous content.

That’s bad because the Google News bot doesn’t follow redirects - it runs from a list of accepted domains, and if it doesn’t find it, won’t crawl it. I didn’t realise that - my bad.

I sent a help ticket to recommend it again - no reply, and left it two weeks. Nothing happened. So I’ve contacted them again, and now have an automated responder that is emailed after the original acknowledgement of a request having been sent:

Thank you for your note. We’re in the process of reviewing the many sources that have been suggested to us for inclusion in Google News. We apologize that we haven’t yet had the opportunity to review your site.

We’d like to inform you that in Google News we only include sites that:

- have original news content (rather than being purely news aggregators)
- don’t solely promote their own activities
- are written and maintained by a clear organization, one that has multiple writers and editors

Before we review your site, please let us know if it fits these criteria.
After we hear from you, we’ll be happy to review your site for inclusion in Google News. If we’re still not able to add your site, we’ll let you know.

We appreciate your support as we work to improve Google News.

Regards,
The Google Team

I think that makes it clear that Google News has been under pressure from a lot of low quality sites looking to get into Google News simply because it’s an indicator of signal, and that’s a shame for the rest of us - and the Google News team.

I’m still developing news sites, and I still prefer to chase syndication on Google after 6 months constant story development, simply because with Google so dominant in the UK, and my sites orientated to a UK audience, it makes perfect sense.

However, it would be a genuine shame if Google News staff really were having to hammer down the hatches against spam - and as webmasters and webpublishers, it would be entirely our loss if Google News staff no longer became as accessible as they once were.

In the meantime, here’s hoping that my own sites can continue to be accepted. I may not have the influence of Rupert Murdoch - but then again, isn’t that the point of aspiring to be an independent press publisher?