Google (good) News - bad indexation?

Hi guys
this is a very general question - on purpose.
I recently begun working on a massive site thats simply plagued with problems - duplicate content, broken links etc you name it - I did my audit and have begun working on the fixes with the tech team.
However I came across something odd I havent seen before, and I may simply be over analyzing this, but figured I would ask anyay.
The issue is related to google news. For some reason the site isnt showing up in google news immediately, rather the newest results are always dated about 5 days ago.

The site itself is big, established and a valid source for original content. I know that its probable that the problems I have already started working on are causing this very same thing, but it would be nice to know if anyone else has ever come across a similar situation or even knows of "a guy who used to date his sister who heard from his uncle" that the reason for something like this is specifically related to this or that.


Anyway any constructive comments, analysis etc would be much appreciated. Unfortunately I cant share the sites address.

I could even post the solution here once I get it solved but this is a big co. with an outdated cms and a massive implementation backlog so I bet the reality is I'll forget to do it.

And no there arent really any good news here - its just a cheap trick to get you guys to read this.

All the best
S.

Well, it does sound like it's a crawl issue with Googlebot not finding\indexing your newest content for a few days. This could be for a number of reasons but if the site is a big and established news site then I would have thought it should get crawled daily.

Have you analysed the site through Google Webmaster Tools - if there's many things wrong with it then there could be issues with crawlability. No dodgy redirects, JavaScript, anything like that

You could also try increasing crawl rate through GWT to its highest setting (if it'll let you).

My only other thought is that - depending on the type of news content - other sites are pushing you down the rankings initially and then after 5 days your articles surface toward the top due to acquiring links etc.

What kind of CMS is it? Do you know if new articles are "pinged" or not?

If not, then it could just be because Google doesn't know you have new content until it comes back on its own accord.

It means you were logged in to the google and visited the same site (not the news) 5 days ago. Since google stores the cookies on your system, it finds than you have visited the site 5 days ago.

Otherwise google is compatible with most of the CMS till time, it can determine when your news was published if your CMS has a date publishing associated with it.

Does your website have a Google-news compatible sitemap that is updated after each news story is published? Does your CMS ping the search engines to let them know it was updated?

I personally think its indexing related to overall quality (number of errors). For that reason (yes the errors occurrences in GWT are high) almost everything I sent in as the first set of recommendations had to do with getting rid if errors.

The CMS is custom built, and honestly I dont even expect to get rid of all the problems, thats why I am focusing on things that I can see are moderate fixes to address. Site map is one that wasnt in great shape - but the To-do is in the backlog... (alltough the back log is getting more attention now) - wether or not the sitemap is actively updated each and everytime is yet to be checked.

All the points are pretty much valid and stuff that I have been thinking -I guess I was wondering if anyone knew of a reason why Google news was "a different kind of beast" , since I am working on more stuff but to get all the current stuff implemented and to wait and see how the big G reacts leaves an awful lot of time for thinking in between..

All in all if (and if I remeber to do it) implementation has been rolling as it should I should see some results and will post them here in case anyone is interested

Thaks guys.

Sam

Hi Guys
a short update.
by removing some of the errors I have managed to get the news indexing up - only temporarily though as its dropped back down again.
But before that happened the GWT news section started reporting increasing amount of errors - 99% of them "too long"
basically there is a lot of stuff on the page in addition to the actual articles and I guess G is interpreting all that to be part of the article and then considers it unlikely to be a news article...
Its unfortunate as the articles are real.
I need to start working on "isolating" the article from the rest.

S.