appeal to readers

About a year ago this site was approved as a Google News site, based on the news reporting we do and the number of contributors. This helped our traffic enormously, and restored some of my self-esteem, as a guy who had made a living as a journalist for 33 years but was suddenly an amateur putting out a blog with dog pictures on it. Our url was philipweiss.org.

Then a few months back we did a redesign and changed the domain name to mondoweiss.net, and lo, we dropped off Google News. We'd failed to tell 'em ahead of time. I have many times filed a change here, but Google seems to ignore us.

I suffer about this, I really want to be restored. Any advice?

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Beyondoweiss

{ 24 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. MRW says:

    Phil,

    I notice you have no ads on your page. Is that an executive decision on yours and Adam’s part? You do have the left column of margin space.

    If you are willing to accept Google Ads, why not go thru Google AdSense and complain that you can’t and won’t apply for Google AdSense until your publisher status has been updated, that you fail to get a response from them. They can get through to the correct department and fix this when money is concerned.

    Barring that, call their headquarters: Phone: +1 650-253-0000
    Or call their New York office:
    Google New York
    76 Ninth Avenue
    4th Floor
    New York, NY 10011
    Phone: +1 212-565-0000
    Fax: +1 212-565-0001

    Google New York
    Chelsea Market Space
    (mail cannot be received at this address)
    75 Ninth Avenue
    2nd and 4th Floors
    New York, NY 10011
    Phone: +1 212-565-0000
    Fax: +1 212-565-0001

  2. Don says:

    Hi Phil,

    first…I sure don’t know what the hell I am talking about…but have you tried posting at the support forum? (and reading through teh q and a…there seem to be many technical details involved)

  3. Oscar says:

    Phil, maybe an interim band-aid is to keep philipweiss.org connected as a forwarding URL. Not sure if the newsbots at Google News crawl the web using forwarding URLs, but it’s a 10 minute effort to have http://www.philipweiss.org forwarding to the mondoweiss.net site.

  4. yonira says:

    Its a conspiracy, I am sure of it.

  5. Oscar says:

    I just noticed . . . the URL does forward to mondoweiss.net. Very strange.

  6. Citizen says:

    The google help for publishers says they need at least two weeks early warning notice before you change domain name; there’s nothing on the help site for when you don’t do this, which is your case, Phil. However there is a google help forum on the site and you can use your google ID to ask your question going to your situation. Somebody attending the forum might have had the same problem and found the solution. Another possibility
    is since you did not give early notice, maybe somehow your old domain name is left in the google system, which generally works so the first domain is assumed to be correct–even though it no longer exists.

  7. Tuyzentfloot says:

    The technical requirements mention a rule about numbers in urls:
    link to google.com
    Articles should have unique 3 digit numbers in the url. This site uses year and month. From the google instructions I would conclude the urls of this site do not pass but maybe it’s a borderline case.

    • Tuyzentfloot says:

      This number rule is odd. I looked up a few blogs via google news and some followed the numbers rule, others didn’t. Maybe for existing sites the rule is not enforced(and mondoweiss had to reregister). Maybe is yyyy/mm/dd considered good enough too.

      They say the rule is waived with news sitemaps . Maybe since the number rule is not followed google news can only rely on the sitemap and maybe this site doesn’t have a news sitemap or there’s a syntax error in it.

  8. otto says:

    We haven’t had too many dog pictures recently. More Phil-Weiss-ism please, we can’t be apartheid 24/7.

  9. Just curious but how much traffic does this site get?

    This site is one of the most amazing sites I’ve seen on the net in terms of content and in commentators.

  10. Philip Weiss says:

    Thanks folks. Much appreciated. Am going to be practical and hardheaded, as y’all are suggesting. Will do more dogpictures in near future.

  11. BluePearl says:

    phil, you can have both domains names point to the same site. there is no need to redirect. assign the same IP address to both domain names.

  12. AM says:

    I also submitted…good luck!

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