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Thanks for the tip... I will do that.

I´m still unsure if I really need to submit a sitemap with thousands of URL´s  I was thinking I should create an sitemap index file the points to individual top level category sitemaps and leave it at that. If I do this though, I suppose I don´t need individual sitemaps per category as I will just insert the category URL´s in the root sitemap.  What do you think?

Hi,

I have read numerous articles that support submitting multiple XML sitemaps for websites that have thousands of articles... in our case we have over 100,000.  So, I was thinking I should submit one sitemap for each news category.

My question is how many page levels should each sitemap instruct the spiders to go?  Would it not be enough to just submit the top level URL for each category and then let the spiders follow the rest of the links organically?

So, if I have 12 categories the total number of URL´s will be 12???

If this is true, how do you suggest handling or home page, where the latest articles are displayed regardless of their category... so I.E. the spiders will find l links to a given article both on the home page and in the category it belongs to.  We are using canonical tags.

Thanks,

Jarrett

Hi,

We are in the process of improving our CMS upstream to resolve our duplicate content issues.  We were hit pretty hard by the Panda update.  One of the steps we have taken is implementation of the canonical link tag across all domains in our site.

You see, we are a news release service with muliple channels and websites to represent each.  The problem is that a client will submit a release and in many cases the news item is relevant to multiple channels I.E. multiple websites under the same IP range.

Site Examples:
www.hotelnewsresource.com www.restaurantnewsresource.com
www.travelindustrywire.com

From a user perspective, it makes sense that they should be able to access the article from the site they are browsing without being redirected to the site we feel carries the most relevance.  We hope the canconical tag will resolve this issue for us.

I have also read about the syndication tag and was looking for feedback or recommendations if we should implement that also, but it may be overkill as the two tags objectives seem to be similar.

I guess my first question is if the syndication tag is only used by Google News.

Secondly, and a little off topic is that we also offer an API and like many other sites, I have read, our content partners are now doing better in primary and long tail rankings even thought we are the original source.  My assumption is that we should modify the API to force using both caconical and syndication tags as well.

Lastly, I´m curious if anyone has tested the original source tag and if we should implement that as well.

Thanks everyone.

Jarrett

Did you see any cases where the Panda update went live, but it did not impact a given site till later on... like 30 days plus, which is our case?  I do see a downward trend in analytics starting the day Panda was implemented, but it was´t until the 11th of April did it really drop.

Thanks Alan,

Yes, the number of ads is another issue I intend to address... that will be a tough one to overcome.

Yes, it appears that every site hosted on our server has suffered... even the non related news websites like www.2casarealty.com, which does not have any news stories posted on, but is in the same IP range as the news sites and does have links to it from the news websites.

I would say 50% of the paid releases sent to us are first distributed in our network and then filtered down to other relevant websites... some of whom use widgets to link back to the full story, others use our API and then there are the content scrapers of course.

We have around 50 niche news release sites in our network as well as a number of websites we have launched to further monetize our business... E.G. hospitalityexpos.com, hotelsupplyresource.com

Yes, I full intend to implement that source meta tag and assign credit to the most appropriate site in out network.  Not sure what to do with stories that have come to us after the customer posted on their site or another news release network first.  I suppose the safest method is to find out where it was posted first and give them credit.

I was thinking we could balance the daily submissions with more editorial content that is written by us.  That will help I´m sure.

Part of the problem is the business model itself... paid news release submissions haven´t necessarily hit our service first.

J

Hi,

On April 11th, a month after the farmer update was released for U.S. users of Google, the primary keywords for ALL our sites significantly dropped in Google.  I have some ideas why, but I wanted to get some second opinions also.

First off, I did some research if Google did anything on the 11th of April... they did.  They implemented the farmer update internationally, but that does not explain why our ranks did not drop in March for U.S. Google users... unless they rolled out their update based on what site the domain is registered in... in our case, Canada.

The primary news release site is www.hotelnewsresource.com, but we have many running on the same server.  EG. www.restaurantnewsresource.com, www.travelindustrywire.com and many more.

We were number 1 or had top ranks for terms like ¨Hotel News¨, ¨Hotel Industry¨, ¨Hotel Financing¨, ¨Hotel Jobs¨, ¨Hotels for Sale¨, etc... and now, for most of these we have dropped in a big way.

It seems that Google has issued a penalty for every internal page we link to.

Couple obvious issues with the current template we use... too many links, and we intend to change that asap, but it has never been a problem before.  The domain hotelnewsresource.com is 10 years old and still holds a page rank of 6.

Secondly, the way our news system works, it´s possible to access an article from any domain in the network.  E.G. I can read an article that was assigned to www.hotelnewsresource.com on www.restaurantnewsresource.com... we don´t post links to the irrelevant domain, but it does sometimes get indexed.  So, we are going to implement the Google source meta tag option.

The bottom line is that I think we put too much faith in the maturity of the domain... thinking that may protect us... not the case and it´s now a big mess.

Any insight you can offer would be greatly appreciated.  Do you think it was farmer or possibly something else?

Thanks,

Jarrett