I manage the BrainBlogger charity blog for free as one of my community projects, and a while back after I changed their theme they got the following email from Google News who includes them as a source:
However, after some investigation, we’ve found that our crawler is having trouble including some of your articles in Google News. In order for Google News to include articles, each article must hyperlink to a page dedicated solely to that article, as your site does. Yet, when the headline on this page is an active link, we often have difficulty crawling
it correctly. For example, the headline “Anti-Stigmatization: Family Doctor or Psychiatrist?” is an active hyperlink on this page:
http://brainblogger.com/2006/06/15/anti-stigmatization-family-doctor-or-psychiatrist/ .
Making these headlines regular text, not links, will increase the likelihood that our crawler will index all of your your articles.”
I’m pretty certain that the bit in bold applies to other crawlers, which means that the majority of blogs aren’t getting crawled fully.
I was stumped on how to fix this and then I remembered what Blogware, my old blogging provider, do with their default templates. Instead of adding an active link to their title they place a small icon with the permalink next to the article title. Look at the blog of TuCow’s (who own Blogware) Business Development Director Peter Ejtel for an example. This way crawlers are happy, as well as still providing an easy way for readers to view the article
I’ve just done the same to my template as the reasons why Blogware do this are clear to me now. I’d recommend that all bloggers implement the same change in their templates, for those crawlers like Google News (and probably many others) that this will affect. It’s such a small change, but it could have a significant impact on your traffic.
