Google Data

Posted by Eric Weigle, Software Engineer

UPDATE: And even more good news as the Publisher Center is now up and running in all countries where Google News has an edition. (Dec 16 2014)

UPDATE: The Publisher Center is now available for publishers in France, Italy, Germany and Spain as well as in all 21 countries where a Google News edition is available in English. (October 27 2014)

If you are a news publisher, your website has probably evolved and changed over time.  Until now, when you made changes to the structure of your site, we might not have discovered them unless you told us.  And that meant they might not have shown up in Google News, which in turn could have resulted in readers not seeing your great content.  To prevent this from happening, we are letting you make changes to our record of your news site using the just-launched Google News Publisher Center.

With the Publisher Center, you can benefit from better discovery and classification of your content and you can directly make the following changes:

• 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 or http://example.com/elections2014)
• Label your sections with a specific topic (e.g., “Technology” or “Politics”)

Try it out, or learn more about how to get started.

At the moment the tool is only available to publishers in the U.S. but we plan to introduce it in other countries soon and add more features.  In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about what works well and what doesn’t.  Ultimately, our goal is to make this a platform where news publishers and Google News can work together to provide readers with the best, most diverse news on the web.