Over on SEOmoz is an article on how to increase web traffic with Google News. At first I thought, "oh, another article about getting included into Google News." I figure it was the same stuff I've seen previously elsewhere. Then I saw something that caught my attention:
1. No links in titles
The Google News crawler can't handle links in titles. Run your titles in h tags and include a permalink on the page that the Google News bot can use.
Holy jumping up and down Martha, that can't be right. Can it? After all, on most WordPress themes, the title of each post is a link to itself. I thought for sure Brian, the author of the post, must be wrong so I checked on the Google News site and this is what I found:
…each article must link to a page dedicated solely to that article. When the headline on this page is an active link, however, we may have difficulty displaying it correctly. Making headlines regular text, not links, will increase the likelihood that our crawler will extract the correct headlines.
Good golly Miss Molly, Brian does know what he's writing about. This brings me full circle with a question I had when I first started using a blog platform (I have been using a blog platform for less than a year). One of the things I noticed after installing WordPress was that the title of each post links to itself. I thought it was very odd so I did some research. What I found out was that the title links to itself because it was convenient for the developer to copy the same code over and over. Otherwise, the developer would have to spend more time editing out the links on some pages/templates.
I didn't want the title linking to itself so I removed the link. Then I noticed that just about every blogger had titles linking to the same page. Doubt crept into my mind. I was thinking, "I'm a web 1.0 dinosaur, maybe these web 2.0 bloggers know something I don't know. Maybe having the title linking to itself was great for SEO." So, I went back and reinserted the links into the titles. Now, I have to go back and remove the title link on my newsy site. The chances of getting my news site included in Google News is very, very, very, very slim. But why make it more difficult?
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You should switch to web 2.0 Google will give you better search rankings if you do that.
Getting the google news bot to go to your website in my experiences is VERY hard. You have to be very news worthy.
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