How do you change your publication name, with Google News?

Really this is more of a mental note or a place to store this information, maybe someone will find this helpful? If you view the screen capture below, you’ll see the last article about Saudi Attitudes in Birmingham shows the publication name as gaurdian.co.uk. Meanwhile CNET News and Cult of Mac (blog) are shown using the publication names they’ve chosen.

It’s really a very simple process and one that shouldn’t take more than a few days to be corrected. Simply go http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py?contact_type=report_update and fill out the appropriate information. As with any request to Google, I highly encourage you to be logged in to your Google account.

This request should come from the contact person Google News had (originally) on file, or you can expect delays and questions.

This popped up for me today because I just reformatted our Google News Sitemap and resubmitted it. I used the full name of our publication and honestly never thought to look otherwise. It does make a difference and when I logged back into my Google Webmaster Tools I was surprised to find all those error messages, resulting from the sitemap I uploaded, yesterday. Your Google News sitemap publication name must match the name Google News shows.

Once the change is done, you” receive an email confirmation from them. At that time you’ll also need to resubmit your News Sitemap.

Please note that this change will affect only new articles. Your old
information will continue to appear on articles already included in Google
News, and these articles will expire after the usual 30 days. We
appreciate your patience during this process.

Not sure what your listed publication name is? That’s easy, just use the site: operator (example: site:www.cnn.com), followed by your domain name, in Google News. The publication name is listed just below your title.