It’s snowing, here in Long Island. It’s not amounting to much, but parents all over (this morning) were nagged by their children to see if school was closed? With the internet being second nature to people, one parent went on Google and typed in Long Island School Closings. They found our page, (clearly with a time and date stamp on it) from 12/21/2009 and saw that their school was in fact closed. She then proceeded to call all of her friends and neighbors, informing them that their school was closed.

By 10am, we received this letter:

Your web site today listed the XYZ Schools as a two hour delayed opening today (January 8, 2010) due to snow.For your information, the school district opened on time.  You listed many other schools as delayed opening or being closed.  They also opened on time.
I am going to recommend to our school superintendent that she have no contact with your paper any longer regarding school closings.  Maybe other parents in other school districts will take the same action based on your providing misinformation this morning.

This was a good learning lesson, in that we did not have one centralized place for “School Closings”. The writers published the story as an article. An easy fix for that was to create a new section named “/schoolclosings”.

Because I want to utilize the SERP position we had for that term,we created outbound links from the page, that Google knew of and directed it to our new page. We did our proper optimization (H1, H2, summary description) of the new page. We also changed the text on the page to read “No School Closings Reported for 1/8/2010″ – only below the link to our new page.

Sometime next week I will request that Google removes the old page from their index. It’s a very simple two-step process:

• Add a line to our robots.txt file ( Disallow: /2009/12/long-island-school-closings-and-delays/)
• Using the Google Webpage Removal Request Tool, request that they remove the outdated content.

Again, it was a very easy fix and a great exercise for everyone involved.

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.

News Corp’s network consists of more than 110 national and suburban newspapers. The New York Post and the ever popular and extremely (organically) visible site, The Wall Street Journal. Not to mention News Corp. owns the Fox Corporation.

In the interview he claims that they will allow for the first paragraph to come up on the search engines. I’m assuming he’s talking about the meta description. Anything after that is subscription-based. This is something I’ve become familiar with as (New York) Newsday has recently implemented a similar strategy. Their subscription based model is to help subscriptions to either their weekly (at-home) delivery or the triple-play package (TV, Internet & Phone) by their parent company, Cablevision Systems Corporation (NYSE: CVC).

I think we will. But that’s when we’ll start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get the first paragraph of any story but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com, you get a paragraph and a subscription form.

My favorite quote from his interview is “There are no news Websites or blog Websites anywhere in the world making any serious money, some may be breaking even or making a couple of million.” This just shows you the kind of man this is. Making a couple of millions sits right next to breaking even, in his eyes. I would think sites and papers like WSJ.com or NewYorkPost.com are doing much better than breaking even, but obviously my warped perspective must start above a couple of million.