Eating a gigantic slice of humble pie

Duncan Riley> Yep, its humble pie eating time here at Blog Herald HQ with an email today from the Google News team that some of the content from the Blog Herald will be returning to Google News within 4-6 weeks. The content will only be posts to the In the News and Corporate categories. It’s taken them 10 weeks to reply to my initial offer after they pulled the site, but I’ll give credit where credit is due, although they’ll win a record for one of the slowest response times on the internet, they none the less accepted the offer, and any theories I may have had about discrimination or otherwise towards them are in the main sort of blown away in the wind. So my humble apologies to the Google News team and my humble thanks for my return to the hallowed pages of the Google News site.

It does however lead me to a little bit of advice for those who cant get in: offer Google News a strict news only category for inclusion as opposed to your whole blog. Either allocate a new category or use an existing one for quality news related items. You can then deliver the best of both worlds: you can still do opinion and advice posts without damaging your chances of being in Google News. For me it will be a good thing: I don’t have to watch what I post any more, I just have to be careful of the format in two categories. And yes folks, it does bring in traffic. My stats were down considerably in May following being dropped last time, and I’ve worked hard ever since getting them back up. Sure, it wasn’t Google News alone, but it did take a sizable chunk away. And to all the critics: I promise to be careful what I write in the two categories, I’d rather God didn’t single me out again.