Here in rainy London we have a mayoral election waiting to be announced. It’s quite a big deal. I just did a quick search on Google News to see if the result had been announced yet. All the usual news sites were talking about how Boris Johnson will almost certainly win.
The Telegraph, though, came up trumps and had a headline of:
Boris Johnson wins London Mayoral election
Slightly surprised that only one site had the breaking news covered, I clicked the link. The page was dead (404) …
What it seems the Telegraph has done is get their headline into Google News before anyone by putting it (or not, as it 404s…) up before it actually happened. I admit to not knowing a huge amount about optimising for Google News. Does this happen often? Why would Google have picked up a headline (URL) which 404s?
If this has been done intentionally (and it may have been an honest mistake of someone preparing a story that Google somehow found), it doesn’t seem right to me. Here are some screen shots of the Google News search and the 404 page.
By the way, to anyone reading this in the UK, I hope you had a good Bank Holiday weekend.
– Phil
