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Recently one of our clients had their news listings taken off Google listings for many crawl errors, our attempts to get them back online by fixing most errors pointed in our dashboard were successful, however we have now received a strange looking error

The article body that we extracted from the HTML page appears to be too long to be a news article. We generated this error to avoid including what might be an incorrect piece of text. Common causes include news articles that contain user-contributed comments below the article, or HTML layouts that contain other material besides the news article itself.

This has been indicated as an error in a page there is no user content, even the advertisements and related content are being pulled with ajax now. I am trying to find how we can solve this error.

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  • Is there a rule here which prohibits publishing URLs, I thought it would help for everyone to have a look at the url, or is there any other issue in the published url?
    – skv
    Commented Nov 9, 2015 at 13:54
  • Well, apart from being a shortened URL (which could hide malicious content) it is a link purely to help with debugging. As such it is unlikely to be relevant for future visitors and could suggest that it is a problem unique to a particular site. Best to include as much information as possible in the question.
    – MrWhite
    Commented Nov 9, 2015 at 15:10

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I'm very confused as to the structure of your site, based on Inspect Element. It appears that different sections of your site, such as the sidebars, footers, comments, and other stories sections are strangely mixed together - this may be what is confusing Google as well.

(The following is based on the link you posted that was edited out of your original post) For instance, if I right click any of the actual text in your story and go to Inspect Element in Chrome, I see the structure as:

html -> body -> div#content -> div#main-body.DIrconflict -> div#main-body-content -> div -> div.wid81.fill.blueline -> div -> div -> div.wid69.fll.lh20.mgr5.mtg5 -> div -> actual text

This seems pretty excessive - are you using a CMS for this site? If it's been customized, I suspect that it wasn't customized particularly well - no offense meant.

As a further point, it appears that the actual text is not in <p> tags, and is instead just regular text inside of the parent <div>. Normally, to achieve space between <p> tags, you could just make a margin on the tag itself - instead, it appears that you place an empty div with a 15px margin between every paragraph - definitely not best practice.

For some further reading about site structure, please check out this page from w3.org - https://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/aside - you'll see in the "Point" section, it lists things like quotes, sidebars, advertising, and groups of nav elements. This will help Google figure out your site in order to crawl it - search results will only come from the main content, but it will still learn about new links to crawl from the navigation sections.

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    Thanks, I do understand that the structure could be an issue it's a complete custom CMS and I am sure there is room (may be a lot of room) for improvement I shall try and implement these changes
    – skv
    Commented Nov 10, 2015 at 4:17
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If you have navigation and/or footer with many links, it could be the cause of error alert too. Try to markup navigation, footer and article with html5.

Another thing: HTML source page can be up to 256KB

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