At the start of this week Google announced the launch of the Google News Publisher Center which is a pretty awesome tool for any news publisher. In the past news publishers would frequently loose traffic as they changed and upgraded their websites since Google News wouldn’t always discover the new structure. The only way to monitor these issues in the past was to frequently check in on your Google Webmaster Tools and pay attention to any new alerts coming your way.
In an effort to simplify this entire process Google has launched the Google News Publisher Center. With the new Publisher Center you’ll be able to make the following changes for yourself:
- Update your news site details, including changing your site name and labeling your publication with any relevant source labels (e.g., “Blog”, “Satire” or “Opinion”)
- Update your section URLs when you change your site structure (e.g., when you add a new section such as http://example.com/2014commonwealthgames orhttp://example.com/elections2014)
- Label your sections with a specific topic (e.g., “Technology” or “Politics”)
Whenever you make changes to your site, we’d recommend also checking our record of it in the Publisher Center and updating it if necessary. At the moment the tool is only available to publishers in the U.S. however plans are already in place to introduce it in other countries.