Google launched a new "Publisher Center" today that will enable news organizations to specify how the search engine should crawl their sites for the latest news.
Google News typically drives a lot of traffic to well-researched, highly cited, and timely news content -- which is key for any publisher that generates a significant portion of its revenue through online advertising sales. (The more pageviews or visitors a site generates, the more money a news organization can generally make from selling advertising on that site.)
The new Publisher Center should receive positive marks from news organizations, who often suffer a decline in Google News visitor referrals whenever a drastic (or sometimes even minor) change is made to their websites. In the past, trying to contact Google directly about the aggregation service not properly crawling a website has been difficult. Presumably, this will now be less of an issue.
"Ultimately, our goal is to make this a platform where news publishers and Google News can work together to provide readers with the best, most diverse news on the web," said Google software engineer Eric Weigle in a blog post.
More specifically, the Google News Publisher Center outlines the following things publishers will be able to do:
- Update your news site details, including changing your site name and labeling your publication with any relevant source labels (e.g., “Blog,” “Satire,” or “Opinion”),
- Update your section URLs when you change your site structure (e.g., when you add a new section such as http://example.com/2014commonwealthgames or http://example.com/elections2014),
- Label your sections with a specific topic (e.g., “Technology” or “Politics”),