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Google News Now Recrawling Updated Articles

August 20, 2009 by Adam Sherk

This week Search Engine Roundtable highlighted a Google News Help thread in which Google confirmed that it is now able to recrawl articles that have been updated within a “short period of time” of the original publishing.

Google employee “Inbal” later provided a more specific time window, indicating “the rate at which we recrawl may vary, but we try to go back and check for changes in article content within the first 12 hours after we first find it.”

This is encouraging news for publishers as previously once an article was indexed in Google News no changes or updates to it would be registered. So if an article was accidentally published with a typo in the headline and then corrected, Google News would still display the erroneous headline.

More importantly, in breaking news situations articles are often initially published with limited information and then later updated with further details. Previously the only way to get the more comprehensive version into Google News was to republish the article on a new URL, which was not the best experience for either on-site or search engine users.

I went looking for an updated story in Google News today and was able to find an example. When I first checked this updated CNN.com article on the Lockerbie bomber:

Updated CNN.com article excerpt

Google News was still displaying the original first sentence (which had been changed in the update):

Google News snippet of CNN.com article

However within a short period of time the Google News snippet had been updated to include the new first sentence:

Updated Google News snippet

Related posts:

  1. The Most Common Google News Errors and How to Avoid Them
  2. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
  3. Press Release Optimization Checklist and Tips
  4. Google News Tip for Google+ Embedded Posts
  5. How Much Google News Traffic Do Publishers Get? Here’s Data on 80 News Sites.

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About Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is an SEO and PR consultant helping publishers with digital strategy and audience development, including enterprise SEO, public relations and social media marketing.

Adam is VP SEO and Digital Strategy for Define Media Group.

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