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I have a client (same for my previous post about the slider) who believes that the url structure needs to include a "google page id" to be compliant with google news. Therefore, they want the url structure set up like: http://www.sitename.com/blog/article-name-goes-here?p=85532 . I think they want just a unique 3+ number id associated with every post. Does anyone know how to go about this?

I am quite good with design and front-end dev, but when it comes to WordPress loops or settings sometimes I am just clueless.

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  • Have you got a link to where I can read up about this "Google page ID"? I've not heard about this before and just intrigued what your client means by this.
    – Scott
    Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 13:13
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    @Brady - have a look here: google.com/support/news_pub/bin/… - basically there's a requirement for a URL to have a unique (to that site) 3 digit (at least) identifier in the URL
    – anu
    Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 13:30
  • Thanks for the link. Learnt something more today. Although I'd rather go down the route of creating a news sitemap rather than sticking to the Google page id.
    – Scott
    Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 14:17
  • In regards to what @Brady said, you can use a news sitemap to avoid having to use the unique numeric ID. More information: google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=74288
    – Evan Wondrasek
    Commented Apr 28, 2011 at 21:40
  • Is the client already approved for Google news and being indexed as news? Yoast WordPres SEO plugin also contains news site map capabilities.
    – Chris_O
    Commented Apr 28, 2011 at 22:15

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Go to the Permalink page (in Settings), and choose custom structure, and use something like this:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/00%post_id%
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  • Thanks @anu .. Do you know if there is anyway for the post id to be "3+"?
    – Louis Stephens
    Commented Apr 27, 2011 at 14:59
  • Not sure what you mean.
    – anu
    Commented Apr 27, 2011 at 15:01
  • Oh sorry. Just in the article (google.com/support/news_pub/bin/…) it says that the page must have an unique id with 3 or more numbers
    – Louis Stephens
    Commented Apr 27, 2011 at 19:15
  • @Louis Stephens - just add an extra 0 to be sure all your posts will have larger than 3 digit ids - this deals with the few posts with single digit ids (ie the very earliest ones).
    – anu
    Commented Apr 28, 2011 at 7:21
  • Just to clarify, are you saying doing something like sitename.com/%post_id%00 for the custom url structure?
    – Louis Stephens
    Commented Apr 28, 2011 at 20:56
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You can avoid using a unique numeric identifier by using a News Sitemap.

From Google's News technical requirements:

The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For example, we can't crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html. We can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html. Keep in mind that if the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that starts with 199 or 200, we won't be able to crawl it. Please note that this rule is waived with News sitemaps.

The XML Sitemap & Google News Sitemap Feeds plugin for WordPress should be able to take care of this automatically for you.

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