Google News doesn't redirect

[Brian Turner]

Damn - the Google Newsbot doesn't follow redirects.

Had a site accepted into Google News last week, then this week decided to rebrand by using a domain name without the hyphenated form - better for branding, I thought.

Set up the redirects so everything should flow smoothly from the hyphenated domain to the new domain.

Then noticed nothing picked up by the Google Newsbot this week.

Remembered how previously when Google News staff would reply they'd say the site had been entered into the database.

So Google News only crawls sites in a specific database record, and won't follow redirects.

I'm always nervous about getting rejected from Google News, and while I figure I'd probably get in, next time I'm going to be much more bloody careful about my branding *before* submission.