Along with some interesting news surrounding the Google Sitemaps project earlier this week (announcing the cooperation with Yahoo and MSN), Google has taken Sitemaps to another level: Sitemaps for Google News for news in English.
Now, English-language publishers who are currently included in Google News will be able to use their existing feeds — or define a more advanced Sitemap of their current news articles — to tell us exactly which articles they’d like us to crawl. While they’ve always been able to use technical solutions such as robots.txt to govern which portions of their sites Google crawls and indexes, this will give publishers more granular tools to tell our crawlers exactly what should be included.
We also want to provide content owners more visibility into which articles are ultimately included in Google News, so we’re now offering error reports specific to Google News. These error reports will explain any problems we experienced crawling or extracting news articles from a publisher’s site. Although we try to make our crawl and analysis as comprehensive as possible, there are always a small number of sites and articles that we’re not able to correctly analyze and include. We hope these new tools will help publishers resolve such issues.
The Official Google Blog added:
Freshness is important for news, so we recrawl all News Sitemaps frequently. The News Sitemaps XML definition lets you specify a publication date and time for each article to help us process fresh articles in timely fashion. You can also specify keywords for each article to inform the placement of the articles into sections on Google News.
Google has made it evidently clear, they are after one, and only one thing, they want your content as quickly as you publish it!
Essentially this is the only product of the search aspect of a search engine. Without you and me writing and publishing on the web, they have nothing to offer their users. If they have nothing to offer their users, just like you and me, then the visitors stop coming. Without traffic, a website is useless.
It begs the question: “If a website is perfect and no one ever visits was it really there at all?”
For this reason, and this reason alone, I will never develop a site or try to optimize a site that is Flash only (see previous post). Search engines are the bringer of traffic, and because of this we have a symbiotic relationship, we both benefit from each other, and without one another, we probably wouldn’t exist.
Time for the soap box: Why would you do anything to disrupt or take advantage of a relationship that grows together? If you spam or utilize black hat techniques to fool engines this provides their user with a negative experience. That negative experience drops the expectancy of that user trying the same channel (or engine) again. My advice, don’t do it, the only one you are ultimately fooling is yourself. Black hat SEO is a drug, it always takes more to get your high (ranking that is)!
Friends don’t let friends use black hat!
Related Posts >>
- Sitemaps Gets Fresh!
- Engines Unite! Google, Yahoo! and MSN Join Forces – Sitemaps.org
- Sitemaps.org Announces Autodiscovery Protocol
- Google Gives you More Information and Control
- Insight into MSN Webmaster Portal
