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My experience is that it works well to generate the specific XML sitemap formats, meta news keywords tags, and the Editor's Picks RSS feed. These can be a pain to do if you're not a web developer, so it's a fair price for the automation. It goes particularly deep on the various news sitemap options. I've had no trouble using it or walking clients through the basics.

It won't organize any of the details you need to get into Google News however (site URL structure, frequency of news publishing, multiple author requirements, etc).

Cheers,

Matthew

I'd opt for 301s if there is any link equity on those pages worth pushing to the forum pages. If not, I'd robots.txt them out to save on wasted crawl.

Hi there,

It wouldn't be a problem to get out of Google News, but by the same logic, it wouldn't hurt just to leave it alone and let them figure out you're not publishing news anymore. It won't affect your web search rankings, since you're not targeting traffic from the news onebox or news.google.com.

These old pages redirect to forum pages? I think the important part is that Google doesn't suddenly crawl a bunch of 404s that they think are news pages of some importance.

Hi Lukas.

The main guideline to follow here is isolating your original content for Google News. This means having the non-syndicated content in its own directory, making sure it's the only content you're submitting in the XML sitemap for News, and when you are accepted into Google News, making sure you keep all the syndicated content out of that news subdirectory.

If you do that, it's fine to have all your other syndicated content in the /SYNDICATED directory. I wouldn't about linking to these articles from other parts of your site. Google won't penalize duplicate content that's syndicated, they just attempt to determine the original creator of the content and filter out the syndication partners from the search results. There's no harm at all having this content on your site or linking to it. As for using NOINDEX or a robots.txt disallow on the syndicated content, it's largely up to you. I know some SEOs who prefer to signal to Google to stay out of there and keep it out of the index, and some SEOs who let the content be crawled and for Google to make the call.

The most important thing is to create a clean, news-only section of the site and only submit that for Google News inclusion, and maintain a sitemap just for that section.

Good luck!

Matthew Brown

Moz

Hi there,

The URL you provided checks out fine in the rich snippets testing tool. What is the exact URL you are validating that is resulting in the error shown in your screenshot?

Cheers,

Matthew

Hi Lukas.

The main guideline to follow here is isolating your original content for Google News. This means having the non-syndicated content in its own directory, making sure it's the only content you're submitting in the XML sitemap for News, and when you are accepted into Google News, making sure you keep all the syndicated content out of that news subdirectory.

If you do that, it's fine to have all your other syndicated content in the /SYNDICATED directory. I wouldn't about linking to these articles from other parts of your site. Google won't penalize duplicate content that's syndicated, they just attempt to determine the original creator of the content and filter out the syndication partners from the search results. There's no harm at all having this content on your site or linking to it. As for using NOINDEX or a robots.txt disallow on the syndicated content, it's largely up to you. I know some SEOs who prefer to signal to Google to stay out of there and keep it out of the index, and some SEOs who let the content be crawled and for Google to make the call.

The most important thing is to create a clean, news-only section of the site and only submit that for Google News inclusion, and maintain a sitemap just for that section.

Good luck!

Matthew Brown

Moz

I'd opt for 301s if there is any link equity on those pages worth pushing to the forum pages. If not, I'd robots.txt them out to save on wasted crawl.

My experience is that it works well to generate the specific XML sitemap formats, meta news keywords tags, and the Editor's Picks RSS feed. These can be a pain to do if you're not a web developer, so it's a fair price for the automation. It goes particularly deep on the various news sitemap options. I've had no trouble using it or walking clients through the basics.

It won't organize any of the details you need to get into Google News however (site URL structure, frequency of news publishing, multiple author requirements, etc).

Cheers,

Matthew