Avoid article duplication in Google News

Articles in Google News are selected by a computer algorithm. If there are many versions of the same article, we may have trouble identifying which article is the original one and which is a duplicate version.

There are a few ways news sites can help Google News find the original version of a news article.

Use the rel="canonical" tag

If you publish the same article on multiple pages within your site, or within your network of sites, you can use the rel="canonical" tag.

Learn more about canonicalization in our Webmaster Help Center.

Disallow Googlebot-News 

If you syndicate your articles to other news sites, make sure that only the original version of your articles show in Google News. To do this, your syndication partners should use a robots meta tag to stop Google News from indexing their versions of your original article.

For example, if The Example Times wants their article to not show up in Google News, they would implement the following in that article page's HTML:

<meta name="Googlebot-News" content="noindex">

The above meta tag on a syndicated article stops it from surfacing on the Google News homepage, topic pages, or story pages.

Disallow Googlebot 

To restrict syndicated content from Google News and Google Search, specify that Google's main user-agent, Googlebot, doesn't index your content. 

For example, if The Example Times doesn’t want their syndicated story in search results, they'd implement the above code but use "Googlebot" as the name attribute:

<meta name="Googlebot" content="noindex">

Learn more about restricting bot access to content.
Was this helpful?
How can we improve it?
Search
Clear search
Close search
Google apps
Main menu
Search Help Center
true
true
false
true
true
100499
false
false