Thank you Dirk
I will get someone to check the addition of extensions in lib.common and see what happens. Not sure if a change at this time with 25000 stories in the archive would make sense as most would be without extension others with.
We have checked the errors most as said are language the 5 or six with real errors some caused by us and some in the theme templates have been corrected.
news.google say it is not our page size average 63 which is the problem as compared with CNN and BBC ours is quite compact. They also say the W3 errors should not raise a problem they are still ademant the problem is how GL produces the URL's. AS GL seems to be the only php type CMS that is not conforming to convention it is not worth news.google adjusting the crawler to conform, as they are aware we are the only major organization, (their terminology) using GL with such an input and output.
Our page hits for October were just short of 1.8 million with 700 plus posted news articles. 95% of our articles are emailed into GL through Sendmail and straight into the mysql and as stated originate from a variety of users set at who knows what language.
It is because of our unique content that news.google have spent so much time trying to get everything to work.
Dirk if you are interested I can send you the various technical responses google have sent ... but as I say the alterations needed are just not work the effort from GL development point of view.
Despite the problems Dirk I am sticking with GL - my additions to this thread were not by way of compaint but just to respond to our Zimbabwe collegue who I felt was wasting his time to expect news.google to index his site after the problems we have had.
Thanks as always Dirk.
Marites
Quote by Dirk:
Quote by Marites: So now you are saying there is nothing to stop this - can you say how - we can hack lib.common if need be.
What I meant was that you could simply add ".php" or ".html" to the end of your story's ID (assuming this is really what Google News is looking for).
You didn't say how you post those news automatically. If you're relying on Geeklog to give them a story id (i.e. one of those numeric IDs like 20051105102630123), then you could hack COM_makesid (in lib-common.php) to add that extension (althoug that would then also apply to IDs for events and links).
Otherwise, you could modify whatever you use to post the news to add the extension there.
Again, I have no experience with getting a site into Google News so I don't know if this is really your problem. Others have pointed out other possible issues with your site, maybe you should look into those first ...
bye, Dirk