anomoly on my google news sitemap

Discussion in 'Google Sitemaps' started by story97, Sep 24, 2007.

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  1. #1
    Recently i redesigned my website. I decided to build 4 sitemaps for google. i have roughly 4000 articles to link to in my site. So i built 4, understanding google only allows you 1000 links on their sitemaps.

    I did all this. No problem. The parser went through all the maps, and completed without warnings. All the links show.

    But now, I have been watching google news and my referrers and ALL of the links google parsed it dated with the time they imported the article. Not the time listed on the article entry. So i'm getting slammed with traffic. That's great, but I don't want to get banned or penalized from google.

    Can someone tell me if this is normal?

    EDIT: Well I've confirmed the problem but don't know how to resolve it. I have well over 1000 incoming hits from google news in the last 10 minutes, the webserver is dying from the massive traffic but I bet my adsense cicks are going through the roof :)

    I don't want to get banned but I don't know who to contact. I joined a google newsgroup but no response to my issue yet. I joined the 'google webmaster tools' group.

    Any hints on what to do are appreciated.
     
    story97, Sep 24, 2007 IP
  2. websitetools

    websitetools Well-Known Member

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    #2
    Your pages probably aren't setting last-modified headers and/or meta tag?
    (Or your sitemap generator does not utilize them)

    If you are using PHP / dynamic pages - from my sitemap generator help file:

    PHP: <?php header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", filemtime($SCRIPT_FILENAME)) . " GMT"); ?>
     
    websitetools, Sep 24, 2007 IP
  3. story97

    story97 Peon

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    #3
    EDIT: I found the problem, and removed the code here so it couldn't be reproduced
     
    story97, Sep 24, 2007 IP
  4. tapanp

    tapanp Peon

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    #4
    Just Resubmit In Google webmaster
     
    tapanp, Sep 25, 2007 IP
  5. story97

    story97 Peon

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    #5
    Not sure if you're replying to me or ThomasShulz, but as I said I found the problem.

    It wasn't what I thought it was. My sitemap had the date/time as google shows on their site, but there was a bad character added (my fault of course). The end result is that google news showed all thousands of those articles as actually being posted on the 23rd.

    So the repercussion? I've got numerous comments asking why google is showing posts that are over 2 years old, and I've got other people who aren't paying attention to the real dates (shows twice on each post in two different methods) and they're arguing about the content because it's no longer accurate.

    This is what appears at the top of each article:
    "Posted 4 days, 15 hours ago "

    and at the bottom:

    "Posted on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 1:53 pm"

    been an interesting day to say the least.

    Traffic from google was up over 600% from normal, and produced less than 5% additional ad revenue. So I'm really starting to wonder where my clicks are coming from. clearly it's not google news, and if that's the case I need to focus elsewhere. But this wasn't really a fair sample since it was screwed up
     
    story97, Sep 25, 2007 IP