I spotted an interesting thread at the Google News Help forum where one site was complaining their articles weren’t being included in Google News and Google replied the reason was because some of the formatting tags weren’t recognized.

What is interesting is that the specific tags called out by Google as the issue were standard paragraph break tags.

Harvey P. from Google said:

I looked at the site in question and picked a random article and it didn’t seem out of the ordinary. The code, including the <p> and <br> used throughout the body content, didn’t seem atypical.

So I am not sure if there was a specific article that had too much HTML formatting in it?

We do get errors on some of our articles, specifically the daily recap posts. Specifically, the error we get is Article fragmented which means:

So I suspect there is a specific form of articles that are not properly structured in which Harvey is responding to.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.