How to Set Up an Internet News Site

The domain. When the publication name and the domain match, your site comes first on brand searches. It matters that the name is short and readable, and that it can be written down when spoken aloud. For a news site publishing in Turkey, .com.tr and .com are the most common choices, and taking both and redirecting one to the other is a common and sound practice. We covered choosing and registering a domain in the domain guide .

Hosting. The load profile of a news site is nothing like an ordinary corporate site. Traffic that runs low for most of the day can rise tenfold within minutes on the back of one story. So the measure is not average traffic but peak traffic. Shared hosting can be enough for small local sites; once daily visitors pass a certain threshold, a virtual server or managed infrastructure is needed.

In the KEYDAL news software packages, hosting is included in the price and is configured for peak traffic: full-page caching, image conversion and the distribution layer are switched on at setup. You do not need to buy hosting separately. If you are looking only for infrastructure, see the web hosting and servers pages.

For internet news sites the waiting period is 24 months as a rule, with an exception bringing it down to 6 months for sites meeting twice the conditions, and a separate arrangement for quota places where no qualifying site exists. For that period to start running, the site must actually be publishing and must maintain the conditions; it is not counted retrospectively. We covered the detail in the article on the waiting period .

Three conditions run together throughout the waiting period: staffing, content and visitor traffic. The staff number varies by category, and the intellectual workers must meet the contract, wage and notification conditions. On the content side, a daily minimum number of stories and originality are required. On the traffic side there are unique visitor and page view thresholds, measured with a particular tool.

The most useful thing to do at the setup stage is to make those three conditions measurable. The panel keeps the daily content counter, the staff list and the traffic report together, and raises an alert when a threshold is breached. Most of the documents requested at an inspection will already have accumulated in the panel. We gathered all of the conditions in the guide to the right to publish official announcements .

• URL inventory. Before the migration, every URL on the existing site is listed. Pages that hold a position in search are marked separately.
• Content transfer. Story text, images, categories, tags, author records and publication dates are transferred together. Preserving the publication date is mandatory.
• Image paths. Image URLs on the old site are mapped to the new structure; no broken image is left behind.
• 301 redirects. Where the URL structure cannot be preserved, every old address is bound to its new one with a permanent redirect. The bulk redirect table is prepared before the migration.
• Internal links. Old addresses inside story texts are rewritten to the new ones rather than being left to a redirect chain.
• Masthead and declaration details. If the domain changes, the information in the declaration must be updated, and the hosting provider in the masthead changes too.
• A trial run. The site is run on a temporary address before the DNS switch, and the team rehearses in the panel with the same content.
• The DNS switch. The switch is made at the hour of lowest traffic, and the old server is kept up for a while.
• A post-migration crawl. In the first week the site is crawled for broken links, missing images and redirect chains, and errors in the search console are followed.
• Archive verification. The number of stories migrated is compared with the number on the source site, and any difference is traced item by item.

• Filling the masthead in incompletely. The electronic notification address and the hosting provider are the two fields most often skipped. The masthead is the channel through which official notifications arrive, so a gap there is not just a compliance problem but a risk of not being informed at all.
• Hiding content dates. Removing the date so the story does not “look old” is a common mistake. The first publication and update dates are both required by the legislation and read as a trust signal by search engines.
• Changing the URL structure later. The pattern of category and story URLs should be settled at setup. A bulk change made later causes a temporary loss of ranking even when redirects are in place.
• Uploading images without optimising them. Raw images from an agency run to several megabytes. Without automatic conversion the site slows down from the first month.
• Working with a single user account. Everyone using the same account makes it impossible to trace who entered which story. When liability arises and there is no record, there is no defence either.
• Postponing backups. A backup cannot be set up on the day it is needed. Daily automatic backups and version history should be switched on at setup.
• Leaving the official announcement conditions for later. The waiting period runs from day one. If the staff and content conditions are not set up from the start, the period begins again.