News Specific Crawl Errors

1. Google Webmasters Central Tool

2.  Causes:
 Too many snippets for related articles.
 Features such as ‘Send this article to friends’ with long
descriptions.
 User comments
 If problem exist, then contact Google

3.  Causes:
 Try formatting your articles into text paragraphs of a few
sentences each.
 Make sure your sentences are well punctuated.
 Make sure you don't use frequent <br> and <p> tags
within your paragraphs, and try to avoid breaking up the
article body in general.
 Consider removing some of the non-article text from the
article page.
 If problem exist, then contact Google

4.  Causes:
 Enclosing them in an iframe.
 Dynamically fetching them with AJAX.
 Moving part of the comments to an adjacent page.
 If problem exist, then contact Google

5.  Causes:
 Try formatting your articles into text paragraphs of a few
sentences each. If the article content appears to contain
too few words to be a news article, we won't be able to
include it.
 Make sure your articles have more than 80 words.
 If problem exist, then contact Google

6.  Causes:
 Place a clear date and time for each of your articles in between the
article's title and the article's text in a separate line of HTML. The
date should specify when the article was first published.
 Remove any other dates from the HTML of the article page so that
the crawler doesn't mistake them for the correct publication time.
 If you'd like to use a date meta tag, please contact us first. Date
meta tags should be of the form: <meta name="DC.date.issued"
content="YYYY-MM-DD">, where the date is in W3C format, using
either the "complete date" (YYYY-MM-DD) format, or the
"complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds" (YYYY-MM-
DDThh:mm:ssTZD) format with a time zone suffix.
 Create a News Sitemap. The <publication_date> tag will ensure
we're able to pick the correct date for your articles.

7.  Causes:
 Make sure that the full text of each of your articles is
available in the source code of your article pages (and
not embedded in a JavaScript file or iframe, for
example).
 Make sure that you're not using a style in the source
code of your articles such as "display:none" or
"visibility:hidden".
 Make sure the links to your articles lead directly to your
articles pages rather than to an intermediate page using
a Java script redirect.

8.  Causes:
 Make sure that your title, body, and timestamp are easily
crawlable (are available as text and not as images, for
instance), but at this time, this error is primarily for
informational purposes. We are actively working to
improve our extraction methods so that you'll see this
error less often.
 Submit a News Sitemap.

9.  Causes:
 Date <meta> tags should be of the form: <meta
name="DC.date.issued" content="YYYY-MM-DD">,
where the date is in W3C format
(http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime), using either
the "complete date" (YYYY-MM-DD) or "complete date
plus hours, minutes and seconds" (YYYY-MM-
DDThh:mm:ss) format, with optional fraction and time
zone suffixes. The date should specify when the article
was first published.

10.  Causes:
 Make sure your article URLs contain at least a 3-digit number
as specified in the following guidelines. Otherwise,
consider submitting your articles through a News Sitemap.
 Make sure your articles are located within the domain of the
site included in Google News.
 Check the page that generated the error and make sure it
includes crawlable links to news articles. Googlebot-News is
best able to crawl HTML links and is unable to crawl image
links or linked embedded in JavaScript. See our Webmaster
Guidelines and tips for creating a Google-friendly site for
information on how to ensure your links are crawlable.

11.  Causes:
 If the article content doesn't have punctuated sequences
of contiguous words, we won't be able to include it in
Google News. Make sure that the text of your articles is
made up of sentences, and that you don't use frequent
<br> or <p> tags within your paragraphs.
 Make sure that the full text of each of your articles is
available in the source code of your article pages (and
not embedded in a JavaScript file, for example).
 Make sure the links to your articles lead directly to your
articles pages rather than to an intermediate page using
a JavaScript redirect.

12.  Causes:
 Remove the "noindex" <meta> tag from your article
pages.
Off-site Redirect
• Causes:
• All section pages and articles must be located
within the domain of the site included in Google
News.
• If you are not using off-site redirects, please make
sure your site has not been modified by a third
party.

13.  Causes:
 The HTML source page can be up to 256KB in size.
Title Not Allowed
• Causes:
– Often this problem can be fixed by setting the
<title> tag on the HTML page to the title of the
article, and repeating the title in a prominent
place on the HTML page, such as in an <h1> tag.

14.  Causes:
 Follow our title formatting
recommendations.
 To make sure your articles display properly
on mobile devices, don't include a leading
number (which sometimes corresponds to
an access key) in the anchor text of the
title.

15.  Causes:
 Please check network/webserver.
• Causes:
– Articles must have a content-type of text/html,
text/plain or application/xhtml+xml.

16.  Causes:
 Make sure your article is less than 2 days old. Currently
we are only collecting articles that are 2 days old or less.
 Follow the date formatting recommendations above.