Getting listed in Google News is an excellent way to achieve more visibility, create a very good impression about your website’s quality and credibility, and capture traffic for your website. Not all websites will be able to get listed here though. Only those with news articles published regularly have a chance of getting in–and even that is not a guarantee since there are other technical requirements for websites to be listed in Google News.
There are two processes involved in scanning websites for Google News. One, there’s the automatic algorithm that will see if your website is following the Webmaster Guidelines and has met the technical requirements for Google News websites.
The second stage is trickier since human editors will manually look over your website to see if your news content is truly worth being featured in Google News. If your news articles are very good, well-researched and up to date, and your page structure is optimized for Google News, there’s no reason for your website not to be accepted and listed there.
Say you have already reviewed the technical requirements and implemented them in your news site. Google would still not automatically crawl your pages for Google News; you would have to submit them for consideration first.
So how do you submit your website for Google News?
Google Wants You To Use Keyword Metatags… No, Really
Just like submitting an application for employment or university admittance, you need to submit an application for inclusion to Google News. There are several questions you need to answer too. Remember, it is important that you impress the screening committee, not just with your physical website but also with its previous achievements. Increase your chances of getting approved by including the following information:
- Talk about your website, its history and what it is about.
- Mention any awards your website has received.
- Show your site’s impressive statistics for traffic and whatnot.
- You should have an authors’ bios page in your website where you can boast about their credentials and writing ability.
- Google requires at least three writers; never give an indication that your news articles and website are written, published, and run by just one person.
- Give them a list of your valuable backlinks.
- Make sure you have plenty of news articles posted in your website already (preferably three months previously).
Other To-Do’s
5 Tips To Get Your Blog Updates Published On Google News
Besides submitting your application to Google, keep in mind the following important things:
- Don’t classify your website as a blog, unless your targeted market/viewers are from the blogosphere. There is an option to exclude blog posts in specialized Google News searches, and serious news researchers are likely to click that field and block off news articles under that classification.
- If you’ve previously assigned your website under the blog classification, you can appeal to Google to have it changed.
- If you’re submitting multiple sites and they all share the same domain, select just one publication name for all of them.
- It will be easier for Google News to properly index those pages, and you will get to enjoy other perks besides.
Create a Google News Sitemap for your website (especially if you have multiple sub-domains) so that you can be sure your pages will be indexed. - If your site is already indexed in Google News, just submit a report to update your website and get its new pages reviewed.
- Use the source meta tag for source attribution
Google News Gets Deeper Ties to Google+
These tips will definitely help you get into Google News. Of course, at the heart of this all are the news articles. Make all your efforts count and be sure that the news articles you’re trying to get indexed are all very good.