Travel Weekly Blog

Travel Weekly has got itself indexed on Google News, but not without a short and surprising to-and-fro with the omnipotent brand.

Its first response read:

We reviewed travelweekly.co.uk and are unable to include it in Google News. We don't include sites that are purely news aggregators, and we weren't able to find any stories on your site that weren't from outside sources.

And there I was thinking the news team that sits not ten feet away was writing articles for us. Heaven knows what they were really up to.

So back came TW:

We are not a news aggregator...I suspect Google may have based its assessment on one of the daily round-ups of travel news that we publish...there are less than ten of them on the site against over 18,000 original articles...

This did the trick.

Thank you for your reply and for providing us with this additional information about your site. We've reviewed your site again and will be adding it to our index for Google News.

Ultimately, Google's service was pretty good when you take into account how much it must have to process - I know Travolution had a far worse time with the Digg customer service team. But as anyone with a stake in a website will know, being unfairly assessed by the big G is scary stuff...

Nathan Midgley, web producer