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Getting Your Joomla Site into Google News |
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Friday, 08 December 2006 |
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 We had great news from one of our clients during November. BleacherReport.com is just over a year old now and is regularly updated by a team of over 400 writers. They submitted their site to Google News and after being accepted, found that on average, their daily traffic has doubled.
The boost in traffic from Google News has been a daily roll of the dice - some articles have brought several thousand visitors to the site, while others have garnered only a few dozen hits. Typically, this is a reflection of the topic's general popularity. Articles about the New York Yankees are always hits, while the Cleveland Indians are less so.
So how do you get listed? There are technical qualifications:
- Have a unique URL for each page. Joomla does that.
- The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. The best solution is to include the year, month and date in the URL. Joomla does that with SEF Advance.
- The homepage URL can't change. Joomla does that.
- Make sure that you're links are in static HTML rather than images or Javascript. Easily done with Joomla and a good template designer.
And there are also quality qualifications:
- Articles need to be of a decent length. At least 300 words seems to be the minimum and Google seems to prefer 500-700 word articles.
- Daily, fresh content.
- If you do include press releases and non-unique content, rewrite at least the headline and first paragraph and include a photo.
Click here to see what Google News makes of their site .
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