Having your news articles displayed on Google News will help instill trust in your brand, spread awareness, and increase overall traffic and impressions.
Google News is defined as a news aggregator service developed by Google. Google displays the highest quality, most relevant links for users to find trusted information on current events.
The Basics
Publishers are automatically considered for Top stories or the News tab of Search. They just need to produce high-quality content and comply with Google News content policies.
Content Types
- Content must be timely, relevant, and of perceived interest to the Google News audience.
Originality
- Content has to be accurate and original.
- If your site has a mixture of self-generated and aggregated content, you need to clearly differentiate this. Otherwise, none of it will get into (or stay in) Google News.
Expertise & Trust
- Content that reflects industry-leading expertise has a greater chance of getting into Google News.
- This content should offer a clear opinion based on expertise and experience within the field.
- It should also be supported by trust signals, including a physical address, supporting authorship, and telephone numbers.
Technical Guidelines
- URLs and anchor links must be descriptive of the content, unique, and permanent.
- Content is provided in HTML format only. PDFs, JavaScript, and other content types cannot be crawled or displayed. In most cases, multimedia content (YouTube being the occasional exception) will not be included.
- The domain on which the content is hosted needs to be accessible to search engine bots.
News content should be clearly labeled as such. It should:
- Have a unique subfolder (i.e., exampledomain.com/news).
- Each news story needs to have a descriptive URL reflecting the content topic.
- You should publish posts in the news category frequently and consistently.
Google News Sitemap
As with all sitemaps, this can speed up and improve the success rates for Google in finding your content and displaying it within the search results. Using a plugin, such as Yoast SEO, can create a sitemap.
When you create a Google News sitemap, follow these requirements:
- Include URLs for articles that were published in the last two days. You can remove articles after two days from the News sitemap, but they remain in the index for the regular 30-day period.
- Update your News sitemap with new articles as they're published. Google News crawls News sitemaps as often as it crawls the rest of your site.
- You can add up to 1,000 URLs in a sitemap. If there are more than 1,000 URLs in a sitemap, break your sitemap into several smaller sitemaps, and use a sitemap index file to manage them. Use the XML format provided in the sitemap protocol. Don't list more than 50,000 sitemaps in a single sitemap file. These limits help ensure that your web server isn't using large files.
- Update your current sitemap with your new article URLs. Don't create a new sitemap with each update.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- At a top level, AMPs are versions of web pages that have been stripped of almost all types of non-text content that could potentially cause slow loading.
- AMPs are predominantly for people who want to digest news content fast, on the move, and using almost any device and varying levels of internet connection.
Submitting Your Website via Google Publisher
- You can use the Publisher Center tool to share your content with Google News by submitting RSS feeds, website URLs, or videos.
- While you don’t need to sign up through Publisher Center to be considered in Google News rankings, it does guarantee your site will be seen in the Google crawl. In addition, some publishers have reported being included in Google News much more quickly after submitting their site.
- Important: Publisher does not guarantee placement. Publications have been independently selected based on promotional timing, quality of user experience, and relevance to promotional themes.
Benefits to Publisher: - Content and branding control: Design, brand, and customize your publication in Google News.
- Monetization opportunity: Publishers can use paywalls in Google News through Subscribe with Google.
- Placement eligibility: Publications with business terms are eligible to be in the Newsstand section of the app in applicable countries and regions.