Come On, Google News!
I’ve written about my attempts to get into Google News before. I saw something this morning that really kills me.
Bad Boy Blog is an awesome site. I don’t mean to sound full of myself, but it’s a cool site and I like it a lot. I’m proud of it. We do some great things. As I mentioned last week, we break stories, we do interviews, we get the truth out. I have developed a ton of Bad Boy related contacts. Artists, producers, managers, label people, PR people and so on. This allows me to do all of the stuff that a good journalist does with my own twist on it. I have a good system in place that allows me to get all of the news and when it comes to Bad Boy Entertainment related news and information, there is no better source on the internet today. We are the best.
Last October, Google News rejected Bad Boy Blog. Fine, alright. They’ve rejected the rest of my stuff, so I was expecting it.
In Bloglines, I have it set up to alert me when a Bad Boy related keyword shows up on Google News, to ensure that I am finding all of the stories that I can. Well, this morning, I saw a news entry from another Bad Boy fan blog. Now, I’ve seen this site before and I know that we run circles around it. It’s not personal, but they don’t cover anywhere close to as much as we do and they don’t cover what they cover as well as we do. They don’t have the unique features we have. They’re even breaking Yahoo! policy by having both Yahoo! Publisher Network ads and Google AdSense ads on the same page. The ads are styled similarly, so they might even be breaking AdSense policy, as well.
To make matters worse, the homepage design that they use is a clear and obvious rip of the design/previous design of a major, major website (top 50 Alexa). So, my question is, why is this guy in and I am not? To recap:
- He terms his site a “fan blog”, as do I.
- His blog is run by 1 person, so is mine (though that may change).
- We cover more stories.
- We cover those stories in more detail, contacting sources when need be.
- We have more unique features and interviews.
- We have a better design. Our main site design was not lifted from one of the most visited websites in the world.
- We operate within the policies of all of our partners and ad networks to the best of our knowledge.
So, why do I get rejected… and this guy doesn’t? I know they receive a ton of submissions, so it’s a tough job. I respect that and I’m not meaning to imply anything about Google. Nor am I trying to get anyone kicked out of Google News. But, I’ve been trying to get into it for a while and I’m frustrated that I can’t, despite being far superior to this site and others in the directory already. Maybe it’s time I submitted again. I think I will. But, if anyone has a contact at Google News, please let me know, as well.
I’ll post back when I get rejected again. (But, hopefully not. :))
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July 19th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Do you have any ideas why Google is denying you? There must be a reason… I wonder what they would have against your site that would make them not include it. Seems very newsworthy to me :)
July 19th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Thanks for the comment.
Well, I mentioned some reasons they denied me in the past in this post: http://www.patrickokeefe.com/2.....ifications
When they rejected BBB back in October, the reason they gave me was that they didn’t accept sites written or maintained by individuals. But, like I said, this other site is written and maintained by an individual.
July 19th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Heh…seems very unfair to you.
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