I always find it interesting when Google responds to specific technical issues on web sites. In the latest one I found, Google's Brenna from the Google News team responded in a Google News Help thread as to why a web site was getting "article too long" errors within Google Webmaster Tools Google News crawl error reports.
It is not uncommon to get these errors but you do not want to see that to be 100% of your errors.
Google's Brenna said the issue in this case is that Google thinks the navigation is part of the body content. She wrote:
Upon checking, it looks like the HTML that may be causing this error is that of your theme. It looks like the crawler considers your navigation to be part of the body.
If you look at the specific examples, such as this page, and look at the source code, it does look pretty messy. The site design itself actually looks fine and I am surprised that is Google's response. The article content is found in the source code, it is just that Google is having a hard time distinguishing between the body content and the rest of the content.
Clean source code, clearly in this case, is important.
As a side note, I find it funny that the Google news help page ranks well for its content even though it is in click to expand format.
Forum discussion at Google News Help.
