Google News used to be a search engine but since last year, they started hosting stories from news agencies like the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse as these services, unlike Reuters, don’t have dedicated websites to publish their own content.
This is probably a very successful experiment because according to bloglines, more than a million blog posts have cited Associated Press stories that are actually hosted on Google News. Similarly, there are over 3,000 articles on Digg that again link to news stories hosted on ap.google.com.
The Associated Press and other newswire agencies may have never seen that kind of exposure had they not done a syndication deal with Google but there’s a small problem – all wired news stories published on Google News have a very short life-spam and expire after 30 days.
That means if you link to some current Google News story from your web page today, that link will return a 404 only after a couple of weeks and all your site visitors will see is this message.
Broken links are an absolute no both from the perspective of visitors and search engines. It may therefore be a good idea to link to CNN, NYT and other news websites where those stories will stay forever.
Also see: Search Google News more efficiently.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/linking-to-google-news-hosted-stories/4617/
Tags: ap, Archives, google news, reuters, Internet
Reader Comments
Thanks for sharing this info. Did not realize that the 404 error would occur under such circumstances.
Written by Avinash on 09.19.08
Pertinent point Amit, but as you know there is No such thing as forever on the Web, so due dilligence as you suggest or providing a cached version (against TOS?) might be an option.
Written by Ram Dutta on 09.19.08
Thanks for this useful piece of info, sice I use google news service for ref, for my blog, Speak India. The concept of time frame in google news is also very useful and powerful. Sorted by relevance, Sort by date, Sort by date with duplicates included proves very useful in keeping track of a lost story .
Written by Sushant Kumar on 09.19.08
Like you’ve mentioned, broken links are not good for any site. So, we need to pay attention when linking to any external sites to make sure the link is some form of permalink.
Also, it is a good practice to use Google Webmaster Tools to make sure you don’t have lot of “Not Found” pages on your site on an on-going basis.
Written by Ramesh Natarajan on 09.19.08
“…stories published on Google News have a very short life-SPAM and expire after 30 days…”
That should be ‘life-span’.
Written by Ankur Banerjee on 09.20.08
The same thing happens (although I’m not sure of the time frame) with many articles on Yahoo! News. I found that out when going back to my del.icio.us bookmarks. >.>
Written by Jake on 09.20.08
hey, thanks for this. Yahoo News Photos is also not a good linking because they disappear after a couple of months ;-(
Written by patis on 09.20.08
I prefer to link back to a story’s original source, to prevent dead links, and to give credit (and search engine juice) to the people who actually created the article.
Written by Kevin S. Brady on 09.22.08