So the good new is that The Inquisitr got accepted into Google News, least the tech stream did anyway. This is going to be a healthy boost in site traffic, although until we start appearing I don’t know by how much yet. I could be hundreds of page views a day, it could be thousands or even more. Its been years since I had a site in Google News, but I do recall The Blog Herald getting reasonable sort of traffic from it.
Now the bad news: I had to change the URL structure to be accepted. Google News will only index pages where those pages have a min 3 number unique identifier. The Inquisitr didn’t, with me having taken the SEO and simple URL route of inquisitr.com/postname. So I had to change the permalink structure of every post (it’s now inquisitr.com/postnumber/postname), easy, but that means a redirect of the old posts…easy, but because the posts didn’t have anything between the URL and name originally the site is now trying to redirect everything with that structure, including archive pages and static pages. The plugin I used for the redirect has an exception box, but how do you define the exception when there is no unique identifier in the first place other than the name of the page itself (and I tried that…didn’t work, it looks for a broader field). So for now the pages for QMeme, About and Content are now redirecting to posts with the same content until I can find a way of excepting these pages from the catchall 302 redirect. Did I mention that it caused me one hour of sheer panic as well? 🙂
Update: before I even hit publish my Google News vanity search email pops up with a hit
