Alert Blog Reviews

Back in February, Google, Yahoo and then-Live premiered a solution to on-site duplicate content: a canonical URL element that let you designate which version official word was, of course, that the element is still just one signal.) Unfortunately, that element only worked within a single domain—if you had your content copied on another domain, no joy. Until now. Yesterday on the Webmaster blog, Google announced a new cross-domain canonical URL element . Now, if you have the same content on two domains, you can indicate to search engines which one is the preferred URL. The element uses the same syntax as the prior version, but now you can indicate the canonical URL is on a different domain: As part of the announcement, of course, they review other ways to handle cross-domain duplicate content, including 301 redirects. However, if you can’t use server-side redirects, the cross-domain canonical URL element can help search engines find the new content and possibly use that new URL in search results. In the questions sections of the post, they note that you can’t use the cross-domain canonical URL element to just redirect search engines to a new root site (it’s for 1:1 mapping of substantially similar pages), and that pages with redirected cross-domain elements should not use meta noindex.

Excerpt from:
Fix Cross-Domain Duplicate Content

Google News just added a neat new feature that can help you keep track of news that’s of interest to you, alongside the rest of the day’s regular news item. Clicking the new “Add a Section” link brinks up the following page that allows you to add pre-programmed news modules, or build your own. When you build your own, you’ll be presented with the following options: Section title : The title of your section. This will appear in your Personalized Google News Homepage. Search terms : Keywords that define your section. Be relevant and creative, and be sure to separate your keywords with a comma. For example, if you’re interested in news about entrepreneurship, you may want to include several phrases such as “startup”, “entrepreneur”, “venture capital” and “innovation.” We make it easier for you to enter these phrases as you type by suggesting related keywords to add. Edition : Language edition of Google News from which your articles will be selected. For example, a “Football” section with the US as the preferred edition will look very different from one with UK as the preferred edition. Source location (optional): Restrict to sources from a particular geographic location. For example, if you are interested in the real estate market in Ireland, you could add a restriction to only show news from Irish sources. This is an optional field and nothing needs to be entered. Currently we allow restricting only at the state level within the US or at the country-level outside the US. The new section will then get added to your personalized Google News homepage and will look something like this one I created for PubCon news: I was going to recommend this as a way to add reputation monitoring to your Google News page, but after testing, I discovered that the new module is somewhat limited–you can’t include exact matches or negative keywords. So, you’ll just have to stick with Google Alerts or Trackur . PS. From what I can tell, you have to view your Personalized Google News homepage, before you can see the “Add a Section” link.

See the original post:
Add Your Own News Topics to Google News