Google News Does Not Index Article Updates

Jan 16, 2008 - 7:46 am 5 by
Filed Under Misc Google

A Google Groups thread asks if they publish an article and it is found on Google News, but then want to make a change to that article - will it be updated?

The answer is no. Google News crawls the page once and will not come back to look for changes. A Google News representative confirmed this:

Currently the crawler crawls a particular article at a particular URL once. So in short, no.

You can get articles completely removed by submitting a written request, but that won't update the news story. In these cases, it is probably best to write a small "postscript" and link to a new story if warranted.

Want an example of a mess up that I personally did once or twice?

Back in August 2006, while at Search Engine Watch, I wrote a dumb typo where instead of writing "Google Has Too Much Money", I wrote, "Google Has Too Much Monday." It got indexed by Google News and showed up like this:

Google News Updates

So these things do happen and they are hard to fix.

I do have a feeling Google News is working on something to update articles, but I have no insider information on this.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

 

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