In a recent post on the Google News Blog, Google made a point to touch base on promotional journalism, and the negative impact the submission of these types of articles to the Google News engine may have. Google states “Google News is not a marketing service, and we consider articles that employ these types of promotional tactics to be in violation of our quality guidelines.“
It would be nice if Google would lay down some guidelines and examples of what they DO want to see instead of vague language about what they will ban you for. For example, is a product launch news or marketing material? Is a company merger news or promotional? Is an upcoming IPO news or a marketing vehicle to sell stock? Is a press release news or marketing material? Is the announcement of new Google AdWords features news or marketing material?
Google goes on to say that “if a site mixes news content with affiliate, promotional, advertorial, or marketing materials (for your company or another party), we strongly recommend that you separate non-news content on a different host or directory, block it from being crawled with robots.txt, or create a Google News Sitemap for your news articles only. Otherwise, if we learn of promotional content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.”
Pretty strict isn’t it? If any detailed guidelines come up in the future – I’ll be sure to post them here. Otherwise – tread carefully fellow webmasters.