Excluding specific posts from Googlebot-News

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  artsofinnovation · Member · May 22, 2014 at 9:51 pm

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  BACKGROUND: I hope my blog will qualify for inclusion in Google News. Overall, I believe it meets the criteria that Google publishes for Google News sites. One concern I have is that some blog posts, though newsy, quote several paragraphs from other sources. They’re properly credited, but they might lead Google to decree that the blog is being a news aggregator rather than a source of original news.

  ISSUE: To avoid that possibility, I would like to exclude those specific posts from being crawled by Googlebot-News. How can that be done?

  MY THOUGHTS SO FAR: Perhaps it can be done by setting up a robots.txt file? Can that be done on WordPress.com? Perhaps in conjunction with manually entered text in the URL, such as “exclude,” which the robots.txt would instruct Googlebot-News to disallow?

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  auxclass · Member · May 22, 2014 at 10:06 pm

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  What is the URL of the blog you need help with? We need that to give you accurate help.

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  artsofinnovation · Member · May 22, 2014 at 10:11 pm

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  Home

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  auxclass · Member · May 22, 2014 at 10:19 pm

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  Can’t do what you want to do here.

  WordPress.COM does not let you access the robots.txt file, putting “exclude” in the title of a Post would just have “exclude” as part of the Post title

  Your only option is to reduce the text you are worried about, refer to it with a link, but less text copied from other sites.