URL's for news content

[mccormackmorrison]

We have made modifications to the URL structure for a particular client who publishes news articles in various niche industries. In line with SEO best practice we removed the article ID from the URL - an example is below:

http://www.website.com/news/123/news-article-title
http://www.website.com/news/read/news-article-title

Since this has been done we have noticed a decline in traffic volumes (we have not as yet assessed the impact on number of pages indexed). Google have suggested that we need to include unique numerical IDs in the URL somewhere to aid spidering. Firstly, is this policy for news submissions? Secondly (if the previous answer is yes), is this to overcome the obvious issue with the velocity and trend based nature of news submissions resulting in false duplicate URL/ title tag violations? Thirdly, do you have any advice on the way to go?

Thanks

P.S. One final one (you can count this as two question credits if required), is it possible to check the volume of pages indexed at various points in the past i.e. if you think that the number of pages being indexed may have declined, is there any way of confirming this after the event?

Thanks again!

Neil

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Neil,

Your URL structure is affecting Google News. There is information here about the URL structure requirements, which can be waived if you use a Google News sitemap. http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=151309.

I don't know of any way to see the number of pages indexed historically, unfortunately.

[leadsprofi]

SO, for this one, make a small research on any news website, and on the seomoz blog articles, you will see every url is unique, and for this question, i prefer you urgently to read the seomoz ebook for starters, and read the next book from Randfishkin,and another seos, the name of book is: http://www.amazon.com/Art-SEO-Mastering-Optimization-Practice/dp/0596518862

and google website optimizing, you must understand the search engine friendly,really good, how to make urls,why, what kind of url, avoid the duplicate content, page=moves, because you are moving the published articles, to the new url, and this make a duplicate content on the google-crawl.

But the best answer is, read the art-of-seo ebook,and you will learn all and do perfectly.

hope it helps,

thanks