Google News used to be a search engine but since last year, they started hosting stories from news agencies like the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse as these services, unlike Reuters, don’t have dedicated websites to publish their own content.
This is probably a very successful experiment because according to bloglines, more than a million blog posts have cited Associated Press stories that are actually hosted on Google News. Similarly, there are over 3,000 articles on Digg that again link to news stories hosted on ap.google.com.
The Associated Press and other newswire agencies may have never seen that kind of exposure had they not done a syndication deal with Google but there’s a small problem – all wired news stories published on Google News have a very short life-spam and expire after 30 days.
That means if you link to some current Google News story from your web page today, that link will return a 404 only after a couple of weeks and all your site visitors will see is this message.
Broken links are an absolute no both from the perspective of visitors and search engines. It may therefore be a good idea to link to CNN, NYT and other news websites where those stories will stay forever.
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