Recently my blog started showing up in Google news. When I post an article to it (or any of my authors) they are listed in the news.google.com pages within the hour. Sometimes in less than 20 minutes. Is this an important achievment that I should be really concerned with keeping? I noticed in the webmaster tools I now have the ability to check my news stats, and when submitting a sitemap have an additional option to submit using the 'google news format'. I don't have much experience with this, but I don't know how much weight to give to this happening. Anyone got experience here? The blog I run is a political site that opposes Hillary Clinton. I've noticed when I publish stories on the busy part of days I'll show in the first 5 results for single words like "hillary" or 'obama' etc.
GoogleNews (and Google Blog Search) are the scraper's best friend. They scrap those feeds and get your content indexed on their site and it often winds-up out-ranking your original content. Google effectively doesn't care about content ownership, so the only downside for you is that you wind-up producing content for no benefit to yourself. If you do a search for a text snippet of an old article, you'll often see the most vile scrapers on Earth listed before your page. Of course, this only applies to commercially valuable topics that scrapers are interested in. If you write about your cat, you're okay.
I'm not sure that you're answering my question. There's no way for me to 'not' be scraped. in fact, I know of two sites that exist purely by scraping my content. but anytime a site begins to build traffic from popular stories that are unique writings scraping will happen. I don't see how to combat it. What I'm asking is whether being included in the google news section is better for me, or something I should be happy about. I'm still included in all the blog searches, but my sites stories now make the news section, which none, literally none, of the competing sites to mine do. I am thinking that this could be a great bonus, but I don't know and I was hoping maybe someone else that has a site inlcueded in the google news sections would know the answer.
Well it should certainly help you out by providing a little bit of traffic, but I wouldn't bother with it myself personally - not unless it is somehow profitable.
How much traffic are you getting from them and has there been an increase in your earnings? I would be quite happy at being included in google news, but the again it's never happened to me.
Yes, I see what you mean. I just never pass up an opportunity to gripe about Google's lack of ability to stop content thieves. As for your question, we felt the same way --that being accepted into Google News and having 99% of our articles published by them within 10 minutes of posting them on our site would be a big plus. But, the truth is, it hasn't made much of a difference at all, other than a very slight boost in traffic. My big hope was that having Google find our articles so quickly (within minutes) would help with the content ownership issue, but just the opposite has occurred: scrapers now have a feed pre-sorted by topic from which to scrap. So, on balance I'd say being in GNews has been a net negative for us. However, if your success depends on max content DISTRIBUTION as opposed to max content RANKING, then being in GNews would be a plus, since more eyeballs are better.
Ahh, ok that's what I was looking for. Thanks for the response. I thought it was just my luck, but after seeing this I think I might be right in my thoughts. My google traffic almost doubled overnight when this started. And it's remained that way. But here's the irony. I have had no increase in adsense bucks. In fact, it's fallen off a bit. This is only a week's results so I'm hoping it levels out, but man that's not good. Doubling traffic from them and staying the same in click payment that's not good. Thanks for your response again, i think the part of me that was concerned has proven a legit concern. I didn't want to slant the responses here so I didn't mention it. but this is exactly what I wanted to know.