Google is implementing a change in its URL policy for AdWords. Starting the week of February 24, all display URLs within an ad group must have the same top-level domain.

“In an effort to provide more relevant results and a high quality experience for our users, we’ve made the decision to disallow multiple display URL domains within a single ad group,” explains Emel Mutlu of the Inside AdWords Crew.

The following are acceptable for an ad group:

- www.example.com
- www.widgets.example.com
-  www.example.com/widgets/redwidgets/
-  www.example.com/index.html

These ones are not:

- www.example.com
- www.example.widgets.com

“While we understand there are legitimate use-cases for multiple display URL domains within one ad group, we ask that you use separate ad groups for each domain,” says Mutlu. “This will not only provide a better user experience for your potential customers, but will also allow you to better organize and track the various domains within your AdWords account.”

The change to the policy applies to ALL advertisers. Google encourages users to make sure their groups are set up properly before the 24th comes, and notes that display URLs must match the URLs of their respective landing pages.

Speed Up Google News Crawling

Getting you site’s content crawled by Google News is not the easiest thing in the world. Luckily, Google has a number of guidelines that can help you get your content in. Furthermore, today, on the Google News Blog, Abe Epton of the News Online Operations Team posted 8 tips to help Google News better crawl your site. These are:

1. Keep the article body clean
2. Make sure article URLs are permanent and unique
3. Take advantage of stock tickers in Sitemaps
4. Check your encoding
5. Make your article publication dates explicit
6. Keep original content separate from press releases
7. Format your images properly
8. Article titles in Google News

Most of these are pretty self-explanatory. He does elaborate on each of them in the post, but I’ll clear a few up here. When he talks about cleaning up the body, he’s referring to formatting as well as HTML.

“If your article body is broken up by tags, ads, sidebars or other non-article content, we may not be able to detect the actual article body, and reject your article as a result,” explains Epton. “In addition, if you place the beginning of your article’s body near the title in the HTML, we’ll be more likely to extract the correct title and snippet.”

With regards to the stock tickers, they simply help Google better determine the subjects of articles. On encoding, Epton notes, “We occasionally see articles that declare themselves to be encoded in one format (say, UTF-8) and are actually encoded in another (say, ISO 8859-1).”

As for the “article titles in Google News” tip, I’m admittedly a little hazy myself. At the time of this writing, Epton’s explanation cuts off.

Beyond these tips though, there are plenty more to be obtained fairly easily by perusing the Google News help center. For example, a look through the technical requirements section for publishers will give you precise details about URLs, domains, drop-down menus, dynamic content, javascript, flash, forums, frames, languages, etc. The resources are there. Use them.

Google suffered a failure on Saturday morning when the message “This site may harm your computer” is displayed next to search results from Google.

Google acknowledged the flaw in human error. In the Official Google Blog, VP, Marissa Mayer explains.

“Unfortunately (and this is human error), the URL ‘/’ for error in a value for the file and ‘/’ is expanded to all URLs. Fortunately, our site care team found the reliability problem quickly and returned the file. ”

“Since we push these updates in a staggered fashion and mobile, the errors started to appear between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began to disappear between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so duration is for a user was approximately 40 minutes. ”

Google nonprofit partners with StopBadware.org to mark sites that are known to install malicious software. Saturday StopBadware fault caused the accident site to millions of users tried to visit the site for more information.

From the blog StopBadware

Google Glitch Creates Confusion

, “Despite the ruling today, we continue to support the efforts of Google to proactively warn users of malware sites, and our experience is that they have undertaken to do so with the utmost precision and the fairest possible way. “