News Errors In Google Search Console

[94501]

Years ago a site I'm working on was publishing news as one form of content on the site.

Since then, has stopped publishing news, but still has a q&a forum, blogs, articles... all kinds of stuff.

Now, it triggers "News Errors" in GWT under crawl errors. These errors are

"Article disproportionately short"

"Article fragmented" on some q&a forum pages

"Article too long" on some longer q&a forum pages

"No sentences found"

Since there are thousands of these forum pages and it's problem seems to be a news critique, I'm wondering what I should do about it. It seems to be holding these non-news pages to a news standard:

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en

For instance, is there a way and would it be a good idea to get the hell out of Google News, since we don't publish news anymore? Would there be possible negatives worth considering?

What's baffling is, these are not designated news urls. The ones we used to have were /news/title-of-the-story per...

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/2481373?hl=en&ref_topic=2481296

Or, does this really not matter and I should just blow it off as a problem.

The weird thing is that we recently went from http to https and The Google News interface still has us as http and gives the option to add https, which I am reluctant to do sine we aren't really in the news business anymore.

What do you think I should do?

Thanks!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Are you still submitting a Google News Sitemap to Google Search Console? Because usually that's the biggest reason where these errors are coming from because Google is picking up these kind of 'new' pages/articles as news content and then seeing it doesn't match with their guidelines.

[94501]

Hi Martijn,

We still have the old /news url still in Google News. I don't think  we've ever submitted a news site map.

Is there any downside to deleting the url structure they're currently looking at, which does forward to our forum? Or, would it be better to just get out of Google News altogether, since we don't really have or publish news anymore? Is there a downside to that?

To summarize... delete the url they look to as news or get out of Google News altogether... what do you think?

Thanks!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Possible, hard to guess what your current set-up looks like. What you could do alternatively is set up a robots.txt with Disallow statement that are only targeting the Google News bot instead of just the general Google Bot.

[MatthewBrown]

Hi there,

It wouldn't be a problem to get out of Google News, but by the same logic, it wouldn't hurt just to leave it alone and let them figure out you're not publishing news anymore. It won't affect your web search rankings, since you're not targeting traffic from the news onebox or news.google.com.

These old pages redirect to forum pages? I think the important part is that Google doesn't suddenly crawl a bunch of 404s that they think are news pages of some importance.

[94501]

HI Matthew,

Thanks for the insight. On your, "I think the important part is that Google doesn't suddenly crawl a bunch of 404s that they think are news pages of some importance" would you robots.txt out the old category they looked at (/news) or leave it and figure out via the mass of 301s and the removal from the url structure we told them to crawl, so that Google figures it out on it's own?

[MatthewBrown]

I'd opt for 301s if there is any link equity on those pages worth pushing to the forum pages. If not, I'd robots.txt them out to save on wasted crawl.

[94501]

Thanks for the answers Matthew & Martijn. So, I'm going to go with what I have in place... 301s to the main forums page to pick up/recycle the incoming links to that section and removing the /news category from where Google News looks for news, but not leave the Google News program altogether right now.

Thanks, again!

[94501]

Update: 5 months later, the problem has long since gone away.