I about blew my lid this afternoon when I read the following from a Wall Street Journal blog about Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search and User Experience, offering advice to the newspapers at an upcoming Senate hearing:

She also plans to offer some advice. The first involves the notion of a “living story.” Google believes, and has been arguing behind the scenes to some major newspaper publishers, that instead of newspapers publishing multiple articles on the same topic throughout the day, they ought to combine the entries under a permanent Web address. Doing so, Google argues, can help publishers–which often complain that their journalism is getting buried amid other less serious content–increase the authoritativeness of their articles and surface higher in Google search results.

“Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity,” she plans to say. “We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.”

Let me point out something . . . Google News only looks at a URL once! How do I know this? Because Google News told me (looking for web reference, if you have it let me know via Twitter and I’ll update the post).

Also, perhaps Marissa Mayer should read this page on the ‘help for publishers’ pages of Google’s Webmaster help pages:

Be permanent. For example, we wouldn’t be able to crawl the page www.yoursite.com/news1.html if it displayed a different story every day. In order to ensure that our links to articles function properly, each article on a news site needs to be associated with one unique URL, and that URL must be permanent (i.e., it can’t be recycled).

Is it just me or did Google just tell me NOT to do a ‘living entity’?

Also consider this scenario . . . Caylee Anthony case in Florida. If the Orlando Sentinel would’ve kept the same URL for several months . . . you know how many ‘updates’ of the story Google News would’ve indexed? One . . . the first one it saw. I worked closely to have a dual strategy for Caylee Anthony. One strategy included ranking well in Google News with each update . . . and one strategy to continually drive the most relevant story to the top of the Google Web results. I won’t get into details but it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that it included 3-0-1 somewhere in the strategy.

Don’t get me wrong . . . I’d be THRILLED to have Google change this policy. I’d tell all my Tribune newsrooms to constantly update URLs with new information on a story. If there is a different enough story to focus on a different set of keywords then create a new URL (example Caylee Anthony pictures, Caylee Anthony funeral, etc.) and story but if it is simply an update to the story . . . just slap it into the same URL. I tell them to do this already when we aren’t going for a Google News play or if we already have the top slot in Google Web (i.e. Michelle Obama dress, been top slot since election night). My mindset is that if people are searching today for ‘Michelle Obama dress’ they aren’t looking for information from months ago, they are looking for the most recent information. The old versions of the story should be captured under a different URL and put into the http://archives.chicagotribune.com

So . . . Marissa, before you give us advice . . . please make your company friendlier for us to take your advice. After all, you do own 70%+ share in the search engine space.

Thanks