I recently did a real world experiment about Google News Sitemap that I think would be interesting to share. You may remember about Google Sitemaps. These are XML documents that you create to describe your web site to search engines. The main advantage is that Google or Yahoo! no longer need to be spidering all the links of your web site to find all of its pages: You point at each page individually, you ease their job. This is important for web sites with very obscure and/or deep links where some pages may be missed. If your web site is not too badly written, it’s interesting but not critical. It helps things done…
Google News Sitemap is an entirely different thing. It’s a way to submit news articles to Google News. Since this is becoming an excellent source of information for many users, it may be critical to meet the expectations of Google in order to collect a significant amount of highly targetted visits from this search engine.
Google News Sitemap must follow rules edicted by Google Publisher Help Center. One thing to notice is that the requirement for using 3 digits in the article URL has been lifted recently.
And, this is relatively easy. You have to publish a sitemap which is following a stricter set of rules (compared to the more usual sitemaps). Two solutions: Either you build it manually (I would not recommend this), or you use one of the good plugins available.
I recently started using Google News Sitemap Generator by Chris Jinks and David Stansbury on several of my WordPress-based web sites. They rank from obscure to relatively well visited (up to several thousands visits per day). And I wondered what the effect would be.
Google Analytics shows visits increase on www.YLoveBigCats.com
I can easily recommend using Google News Sitemaps: A few days after starting publishing it, I got a very noticeable visit increase on all of these web sites. It was fully simultaneous (on the day Google starting using them less than a week after initial publication) and was producing +10% to +40% increase. I never had a single operation of that kind, done in so small amount of work leading to so many more visits.
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