News-specific crawl errors often prevent news releases from appearing in Google News. Here are the 16 crawl errors ( http://bit.ly/google-newsbot ) for news publishers to consider. Of the 16, there are 5 common pitfalls that can be easily avoided: 1) Ensure your release is more than 80 words, I recommend 300-500 words. 2) Body copy should have paragraphs of a few sentences each, not 1s and 2s. 3) If you use bullet points, don’t proceed the bullets with only 1-2 sentences and avoid using the bullet character. 4) If you need to reference an old date in the release, make sure the publish date appears at the top of the release. 5) The headline should be 2-22 words, I find that 7 words works best.