Help: domain name change and Google News
-
Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again.
The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive.
The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately.
Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?
-
Thank you Kristina; I'll take a look.
-
That's a bummer, that Google didn't give more feedback.
My question about meta keywords is related to this: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68297?hl=en
Other than that and what I've listed, I can't think of anything else that you'd need to keep an eye on. Let us know how things go when Google reevaluates!
Best,
Kristina
-
Thanks for replying, Kristina. I spoke to my Al Dia contact for answers to your questions:
Did they change the look and feel of the site? No, it’s the same as before.
**Did they change the URL structure (this is especially important, since Google looks at the URL for dates)? **The only change it is the name on the url , the date still appears the same as before on each story. Now: http://aldiadallas.com/news/2003/aug/05/co0867348576356/. Before: http://aldiatx.com/news/2003/aug/05/co0867348576356/.
**Did they update their Google News sitemap? **When they requested the google news confirmation, they did include the new sitemap.
Are they still properly using Google News meta tags, specifically news_keywords? They are using open graph tags. I'm not familiar with specific Google News meta tags or news_keywords -- can you point me to a resource on that? I might be mis-googling; I'm not able to find anything specific to that kind of tagging.
Did they remove Authorship? She says she's not sure about Authorship. I'm thinking it wasn't part of the overall scheme to begin with.
Also, did Google give any feedback when they rejected their first application? Google just said to reapply in 60 days and check their guidelines.
Thanks in advance for any other insight you (or anyone else reading this) else can lend.
-
Hi Christy,
I think my biggest piece of advice other than "hang tight" is, what did they change other than the domain name?
- Did they change the look and feel of the site?
- Did they change the URL structure (this is especially important, since Google looks at the URL for dates)?
- Did they update their Google News sitemap?
- Are they still properly using Google News meta tags, specifically news_keywords?
- Did they remove Authorship? (I have no proof of this, but I've heard rumors that people think Google still uses Authorship, even though they've removed it. It's possible that's just a mean rumor from bitter SEOs after their rich snippet loss, though.)
Also, did Google give any feedback when they rejected their first application?
Best,
Kristina
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
404 crawl errors ending with your domain name??
Hello, I have a crawl test with numerous 404 errors ending with my domain name..? Not sure what the cause is. Plugins? Ecommerce? I use Wordpress if that could lead to an answer. Thanks for your time. K
Technical SEO | | Hydraulicgirl0 -
Help with Getting Googlebot to See Google Charts
We received a message from Google saying we have an extremely high number of URLs that are linking to pages with similar or duplicate content. The main difference between these pages are the Google charts we use. It looks like Google isn't able to see these charts (most of the text are very similar) and the charts (lots of it) are the main differences between these pages. So my question is what is the best approach to allowing Google to see the data that exists in these charts? I read from here http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/69818/how-can-i-get-google-to-index-content-that-is-written-into-the-page-with-javascr that a solution would be to have the text that is displayed on the charts coded into the html and hidden by CSS. I'm not sure but it seems like a bad idea to have it seen by Google but hidden to the user by CSS. It just sounds like a cloaking hack. Can someone clarify if this is even a solution or is there a better solution?
Technical SEO | | ERICompensationAnalytics1 -
About how google works
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
I want to ask a basic question. If I search for Larry Page lets say.
I think google look for it's index for word larry and page distinct.
And mix it up. But the question ;
Can google show a result which only Larry exist on the page but any of the synonym or the stem of the Page not exist .
If it can happen how this page can be showned in larry page query. Thank you.0 -
Selling Domain,,,,, OOOOPPPPPPsssss!
Hey Everyone, I think I may have screwed up big time. I have an old 4 letter domain that I've been sitting on for many years. I had no idea what it was worth and ended up putting it up on ebay. I have since been told that it's quite valuable. I just tried to end the auction and ebay won't let me end it. My thinking is that someone here may want to take advantage of my mistake. Even better, let me know if there are any tricks to ending the auction. The domain is http://proa.com If for some reason it doesn't sell, where is a good place to sell it at a fair price? Have a good one. David
Technical SEO | | dmac0 -
301 redirects and old domain names
Thanks to the great advice i've received on this forum, I'm combining 50 different truck sites into a single, ultimate truck website. So my question is how long should I make a website 301 redirect to the appropriate page on my new website? My thought is that if it works well to have a single website, it might be nice to eventually sell off some of the old domain names that I won't be using anymore. Thanks! Andy
Technical SEO | | daenterpri0 -
Keyword domains
Hi everyone. Two questions regarding keyword domains (e.g. "widgets.com") If we have to choose a domain with an extra word, does it make a difference to have the added word before or after? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "widgets-now.com" Does it make a difference if the extra word is a generic vs a 'real' word? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "japanese-widgets.com" Thanks a lot for your feedback!
Technical SEO | | hectorpn0 -
"Site Suspended" in Google Adwords + Lost all rankings in Google => is this related?
Can anyone share thoughts on this: Does the S recently (mid april) we revamped our website (same content, new layout, strong brand), but a few days later our google rep contacted us to tell that she got a "red flag" for one of our SEA campaigns (we broke the bridge page policy, not on purpose to be clear), they were completely correct on this matter. We even got some extra time to correct this, normal policy is only 10 days. But, we were a little slow, so all our Adwords Campaigns are suspended and we get the message "Site suspended". We are working to have this fixed, our Google rep even granted some more time to fix this. Now, almost simultaneously, same time frame, all our new pages, that were already ranking well tx to proper 301 rules, suddenly fell out of the google SERPS, nothing to be found anymore up till now. Our website is live since 1996, no issues, up till now. There seems to be a strong correlation to what happened in our SEA and what happened in our SEO can anyone share some info?
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
How to proceed with domain switch AND url change
Hi, in a few weeks we'll do a major change on our website. This involves over 1.5 million pages indexed in Google driving substantial amount of our traffic. Basically we have 2 types of changes: subdomain switches to domain:
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories
ex. product.company.com will become www.product.com
for this we know how to manage DNS and Apache rules different url patterns, basically replacing ugly urls by pretty urls
for this we have advanced 301-mapping rules set up Here is the question - what is best way to proceed with these 2 changes in order to preserve rankings and organic traffic: Do both changes simultaneously? First do url changes, than the domain switch Can you please share your thoughts?0