While your website may provide fantastic material, your audience will be limited if your pieces do not display in Google News. Google News gathers news from over 50,000 sources throughout the world, and inclusion in Google News offers various advantages, including the potential to drive website traffic.
To be included in Google News, content providers must improve their website and articles using Google News SEO, a specialized discipline that assists publishers in becoming approved news sources. Keep in mind, however, that no amount of search engine optimization (SEO) will get a website certified as a news source if it isn’t genuinely a news source.
We’ll go over the fundamentals of how to get into Google News, and if you just want a piece of news covered in Google News, we’ve got a few pointers for you as well.
The Google News index and how it works
Google News is not a news publisher in and of itself. Rather, it combines news from several sources and uses algorithms to determine which news stories to show readers depending on their interests, location, prominence, authoritativeness, freshness, and usability. The results are then classified into subjects and subtopics.
Google employees conduct very little manual curation. Staff will occasionally curate important worldwide news events or a topic that is gaining popularity in popular culture, such as an awards show.
To decrease the appearance of incorrect information, Google has prioritized authoritative results over the most recent or relevant during breaking news or crisis situations since 2018. Google works with publishers to arrange data and include quality signals to assist the search engine in identifying the most trustworthy news results.
Google News results (on the right) seem differently than standard Google search results, as shown in the screenshots below (on the left). A general search for “lunar eclipse” returns multimedia results such as videos, whereas a News search returns only news pieces.
Another distinguishing feature of Google News results is the ability for users to interact with things right from the search results, allowing them to access extra information and customize their news results in the future.
As shown in the image above, consumers may choose whether they want to view more or fewer stories like this, and they can also hide stories from a certain news network or publisher.
Advantages of appearing in Google News search results
Google News SEO is much more than just increasing traffic to your website. In fact, you might not see a lot of traffic from Google News in your Google Analytics account. The most significant advantages may be more indirect.
For one thing, inclusion in Google News indicates that your brand is trustworthy and authoritative, as Google maintains strict criteria. Websites admitted into Google News must provide original content, and the number of adverts and sponsored content on the site must not surpass the amount of news content on the site. Google News sources must also have unambiguous dates, author bylines, and publisher information.
Another advantage of including your work in Google News is that it will appear in search results within minutes after publication, far faster than other news sites. This is especially useful in times of breaking news.
Because Google News feeds are customized, if you continuously publish quality material to your site and build a recognizable brand, you may find that visitors are more willing to engage with your content. Users that interact with your material and choose to see “more stories like this” in the future will be served other content from your website.
Google News also assists publishers in a variety of ways. In 2018, Google, for example, announced a $300 million initiative to improve quality journalism and battle misinformation on the Internet. The Google News Initiative is a three-year effort that comprises a number of tools, including features that assist publishers in driving subscriptions and increasing income.
Finally, inclusion in Google News can assist your material appearing in Google’s main search tab’s “Top Stories” section.
Because of its prominent appearance at the top of the page, inclusion in Google’s Top Stories can lead to higher traffic, as shown in the example above.
How to Sign Up for Google News
If you own a news website, you have two options for getting your content indexed in Google News: license your content through the Producer tool, or submit your website for inclusion through the Publisher Center.
What is the distinction between a Producer and a Publisher?
Google News Producer is a publishing tool that allows you to create a branded feed of your existing content, run advertisements, and develop your subscriber base. Producer allows you to link to or import content from your website, as well as add multimedia features such as video and audio, and optimize content for numerous digital devices.
Google News Producer is a component of Google News, and things in your feed may appear in the main Google News results. It is crucial to emphasize, however, that a Producer is neither an authoring nor a content management tool. All Google News Producer content is developed elsewhere and then brought into or linked from the Producer after it is finished.
The Publisher Center, on the other hand, provides a portal for publishers to manage their Google News news sites. You’ll be able to change your website data, adjust URLs, and label portions of your site with specific identifiers such as “Business” or “Politics” once your site has been confirmed in Google Webmaster Tools and featured in Google News.
However, before you can control the many features of the Google News Publisher Center, you must first submit your website to Google News for inclusion so that your news site can be automatically indexed.
Know more about : Page Title SEO, Keyword Density, Technical SEO, Google Penalties
Google News SEO: 6 Tricks for Getting Your Site Crawled as a Google News Publisher
1. Adhere to Google’s technical guidelines to ensure that bots can crawl your site.
To crawl websites, Google News employs an algorithm. You must have unique, permanent URLs to assist the system in determining which pages of your site are articles. When Google’s crawler searches a site, it looks for HTML, thus all content and links must be in HTML format. Avoid using multimedia information, PDFs, or JavaScript, as these cannot be scanned by the crawler.
2. Improve your chances of inclusion by optimizing further.
As with any SEO strategy, you’ll want to make it simple for bots. For each article, use structured data (NewsArticle) markup, which provides information such as a headline, dateline, keywords, and publication date. Also, avoid breaking up the flow of the news with extraneous items such as videos, photo galleries, or linked articles. Google News indexes HTML code that is one continuous block of code from the headline to the article conclusion the most efficiently.
You may also use Alexa’s Site Audit tool to optimize content and uncover problems with your website. This tool ranks websites based on 29 SEO best practices and provides a list of steps to take to improve your site’s SEO.
For example, in the image above, Alexa’s Site Audit tool has assigned this website an overall score of 88/100 and suggested activities that can be made to improve the site’s SEO performance, such as giving vital pages unique titles and adding links to difficult-to-find sites.
3. Show that your website is a reputable source
Google News wants readers to trust the news sources it carries, therefore it’s critical to be open and honest. News sources should include contact information as well as information about the newspaper, the publisher, and the company or network behind the publication. Dates, bylines, and author information should all be clearly displayed in news pieces.
Notice how the publishing time and date are displayed at the top of the page in the article below, along with the author’s name, which links to the writer’s bio as well as her other pieces. The byline “Washington” comes before the body of the report as well.
Having skilled contributors provide original content for your site is also beneficial since it increases the likelihood that Google News will accept your website for inclusion.
4. Publish new information on a daily basis.
Every day, your news site should be updated with several new stories. While syndicated content from news agencies such as The Associated Press, Reuters, or United Press International might be included on your site, don’t rely too much on wire services. The majority of your site’s content should be unique.
5. Carve out a niche.
Google looks for news sources with unique points of view, so having a particular focus that distinguishes your website from others is beneficial. Because there are so many news sites that report on general news, specialty sites that give in-depth reporting on certain themes or industries are more likely to get indexed and justify inclusion in Top Stories. Space.com, for example, which focuses solely on space and astronomy news, has established itself as a pioneer in this field.
6. Produce a sitemap.
Create a Google News sitemap after your site has been accepted into Google News for faster, more effective indexing of your news articles. Sitemaps provide information about your website’s content, and a Google News sitemap allows you to decide which content you send to Google. Even if your website already has a sitemap, Google suggests developing a separate one for news articles. This enables Google’s crawler to find articles on your site more rapidly.
Get your company’s website listed in Google News
Perhaps you simply want a company announcement or a specific news report about your industry to show in Google News. Not all is lost.
One method is to employ a press release service that has been approved by Google News. If you don’t have the cash for a press release, consider contacting sites that cover news in your business directly.
How do you find potential websites to contact? The Audience Overlap Tool in Alexa can be useful. Simply enter your website address to view clusters of other websites with comparable audiences or keywords. Using Zillow as an example, we can see a number of options.
Following that, you will need to visit each site to see if they will cover your news. You should also double-check if it is listed in Google News. Simply search Google News for their content; if it appears in the News part of the search results, it has been authorized. Then hunt for an editor who writes about your topic and contact him or her.
Keep in mind that even if your information is not collected by Google News, it may still appear in Google’s main search results as Top Stories.
Take the first step in gaining access to Google News
If you run a news website and aren’t yet listed in Google News, it’s time to change that. Yes, Google’s rules are stringent, but you may discover that following the steps outlined above will improve the overall quality of your site. If you aren’t quite ready for Publisher status, the Google News Producer tool may be a good alternative.
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