The Google News Blog has posted on some truths and myths about its ranking systems (via Cowbite) – and this one caught my eye:
“Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we’ve crawled it, they won’t be reflected on our site. We hope that soon we’ll have the ability to re-crawl your articles to make sure we have the latest version displayed on our site, but for now this is not the case.”
In other words, the commercial pressure here is not to update a single article, but to instead create new ones with the new information (there is already an imperative here in that this increases your page count stats).
I’m not sure if this is a bad thing (errors go uncorrected?) or good (twitter-style newsrivers?).
Also worth noting:
“Articles that are just images or video won’t be included TRUE
While we will include articles that contain multimedia content, if our crawler cannot find accompanying text content, it won’t include the article. The bottom line here is that our crawler is looking for text articles, so if some of your content isn’t text-based, it won’t be included in Google News. In the meantime, we’re working to find ways to add more multimedia content such as our recent integration with video news from YouTube.
That’s pretty much common knowledge where I come from, but worth spelling out from the people themselves. Video is not all its cracked up to be.