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Google News no longer requires stupid numbers in the URL

A few months back I added 3 digit numbers to the end of all the URL’s on Blogstorm purely to get included in Google News. I’m not a fan of numbers in URLs because they don’t mean anything to users and just make it look untidy.

Yesterday I removed the numbers because it is no longer a Google News requirement, as long as you have a News Sitemap.

The three-digit-number requirement is waived if you submit a Google News sitemap in order to alert our crawler to your news articles in your Blog.

This tool will enable you to optimize the inclusion of your content without having to change the structure of your URLs. You can find more information about creating a News sitemap in our Publisher Help Center:

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/topic.py?topic=11666

I used the Google News Sitemap generator plugin to create my sitemap.

If you want to get into Google News read the Advanced Webmasters Guide to Google News.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 9:44am ON Thursday, 19 March 2009

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.miss-thrifty.co.uk Karyn

    This is good to know – thanks Patrick!

  • http://www.jayblogger.com Jason

    Thanks Patrick! Just what I needed. Not two week ago did I add a random 3 digit number! Time to take it back out again!

    Cheers

    Jason

  • http://www.adigaskell.org Adi

    Good find, thanks Patrick.

  • http://www.tekstsyndikatet.dk kim

    Hi,

    Great news. Could you advice on other news syndicators that are as important as Google News?

  • http://www.AlexDumitru.eu Alex Dumitru

    That’s great news, now all my blogs have the post id in URL just for Google News.

  • http://www.seroundtable.com Barry Schwartz

    I believe this has been the case for a couple months now. I wrote about it at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/019294.html

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Thanks Barry, hadn’t spotted that.

  • http://www.seroundtable.com Barry Schwartz

    No problem, I write too much. People easily miss stuff I write. Just wanted to add that link for date purposes, this way we know it was before Jan 28, 2009.

  • http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/ Nick Stamoulis

    I always prefer a much cleaner looking URL structure. I think it works well for branding when it looks neat.

  • http://affiliate4travel.co.uk Rob Barham

    Thanks for this news about Google News, I also added digits just for them on one site. Will be losing them from now on.

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  • http://www.cyberdots.co.uk/ Mark (Isle of Wight, UK)

    Thanks for the update. I’d just read your previous article and I my first thought was crumps, that mess up the permalink structure to try and get into Google News!

    I didn’t realise the potential to get into Google News was so achievable, and I have even more things to think about now when creating content! I will have to read more about the submission guidelines and see how compliance might change the structure of site content in future. Cheers, Mark.

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  • http://www.mentorlog.com MentorLog

    Awesome I was about to change my permalink. Thanks for the news

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