How to Get Your Website Listed in Google News

Google News is a service that collects article headlines from web portals and displays them in one place, combining and reproducing the most important ones. The news portal’s request is automatically addressed by a computer program for selecting and posting articles on Google. Still, Google employees decided to add the entire portal to the service based on the submitted application.

Google News currently collects headlines from news portals from 50,000 different Internet addresses. Each of these portals has applied for Google News, has been technically and content tested, and is then displayed on the Google News website.

Google News provides additional traffic to the site and does not charge a fee. The service works almost everywhere in Europe, with a few exceptions in Spain and Germany, where publishers wanted to get money from Google for displaying these headlines, so Google withdrew the service from these countries or stopped showing some publishers.

Well, the answer to that question is obvious. Google generates expert sites, which in turn affects coverage and visibility. Some will also receive sales and conversions. However, if you look at it realistically, the answer to the above question will be more difficult.

After studying some statistics, it was found that users trust news from Google News more than from other news sources. A high level of trust opens up much wider business opportunities than traditional website revenue and bandwidth statistics. Trust is a key factor in the variety of sites that create messages. This can affect user behavior in pre-and post-click ads.

For many companies trying to submit a site to Google News, this is another way to promote existing and future content. When you invest a lot of time, money, and resources in every part of your resource, you just have to make such an investment to achieve your goals. If you miss the idea of “submit a site to Google News” or don’t appreciate the potential of this service, it can be painful in the future when you learn that other competitors are thriving thanks to Google News.

Personal information. Google does not allow to transfer of confidential information and personal data of individuals (such as medical records or financial information).

Copyrighted content. Google News does not allow content that violates anyone’s intellectual property rights. Repeated infringement of intellectual property rights, including copyright, may result in denial of placement.

Sexual theme. Google does not permit the display of sexual content primarily intended to cause sexual arousal.

Graphic content that contains violence. Google does not allow content that incites or glorifies violence.

Illegal detention. Google does not permit posting content that promotes violence or harassment against a person or group of individuals based on ethnicity, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Dangerous and illegal actions. Google does not permit content that promotes unsafe or illegal activities, including self-harm, indigestion, or drug abuse. 

Sponsored content. Google does not allow content that hides or misinterprets sponsored content as independent editorial content.

Spam and malware. Excessive repetitive content, spelling mistakes, or character tricks are not allowed.

Google uses an algorithm that processes, detects, and indexes news. However, there are many other technical factors that must be considered. Most of them are major SEO factors. Other small details are related to Google News. So first, you need to look at the most important:

• URLs and bindings must describe the content, be unique and consistent (no 404 error);
• the content must be provided in HTML format. In turn, PDF, JavaScript, and other types of content will not be searchable by search engines, and therefore will not be able to appear on Google News;
• the domain where the messages are placed must be available for search engines;
• you cannot block articles in robots.txt or in meta tags (but this is a fairly obvious technical requirement).

Nowadays, the level of content quality is present in all aspects of Google’s algorithms. If you’re not sure what’s behind the word quality, read the webmaster’s guidelines and take a good look at your website and its content. This will allow you to compare your site with the best pages in the same topic’s rankings. Ensure your site’s content meets the basic requirements, such as opinions, trust, statistics, etc.

At this point, it should be emphasized that Google News mostly only takes the news. Trying to add all your content is a bad tactic, and you’re probably doomed to failure. The content, in most cases, will be industry and niche-specific. Content may contain expert quotes and user feedback but beware of business ads and anything that may advertise a product or service.

There are several tactics that can be used to help you get into Google News: 

There are broader areas that directly affect the consistent addition of your own news to Google News. Many of them are reduced to basic practices. The content of the message should be clearly marked as having its unique directory. In turn, each link with a prefix must have its unique description that will reflect the content of the URL.

New messages should download quickly, be rich in verified information, and easily accessible. In addition, they must be valuable and supported by facts. The regularity of publication is to add messages, for example, weekly or every two days, rather than once every ten days: the more user engagement, the better.

Sitemap – news map. By creating a unique Google News Sitemap and submitting it directly to Google, you can manage news that meets or exceeds Google’s recommendations. This will help you highlight the best news that can increase your likelihood of appearing in Google News. As with all site files, this can speed up and improve your site’s ranking on Google and increase your chances of displaying messages in News search results.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). These are websites that have introduced the AMP project for their content, which Google highly supports. Accelerated mobile websites lack almost all types of non-textual content that can potentially cause slow downloads.

Before submitting a page to the Google News Publisher Center, make sure your content is already indexed naturally. You’ll be amazed at how many publishers really forget to go through the notification process. This will allow you to collect feedback to increase the likelihood of acceptance and increase the likelihood that your news will be added more in the future.

The best news. You can send up to five news items to Google that you want to make more important. Basically, this is the latest news. On the other hand, it could be news that Google missed, and you want it to hit the news.

Use the additional meta tag “news_keywords”, which can contain up to 10 keywords that define the article’s content.

In addition to the quality of the materials, the features of their design on the site pages are also important. The structure of the latter should be as clear as possible. The presence of a sitemap is of great importance. It is necessary that at least one text link can be navigated to each page. However, do not overload the pages with links, as well as unnecessary information.

Key search words must be present in the site texts. For the correct processing of your site by the system, all links must be working, and the HTML code should be correct. You should not present important information and links with images – the search robot only perceives text but cannot crawl graphics, JavaScript, audio files, and multimedia. It is better to accompany pictures and videos with a description using the “ALT” attribute. Materials in PDF format will not be read. Please note that the system does not handle dynamic pages well, so the number of their parameters should be reduced to a minimum.

The site should not contain redirects to domains other than the one submitted in the application. As for the articles, each of them should be on a separate permanent URL. It is critical that the site loads easily and display adequately across different browsers. Its performance can be checked using the Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest systems, and the speed on the user’s side in different countries of the world – using a special tool from Google.

To check the site for “readability” for search engines, it is also recommended to use the text browser Lynx, the principle of which is similar to that used by the “spiders” of search engines. Just like the browser, they will not be able to overcome JavaScript, cookies, session IDs that track user behavior on the resource, frames, DHTML.

Google News crawls your content to showcase content on Google News using the Googlebot. Robots.txt instructions for crawlers that outline which directories are allowed to be crawled are written in the robots.txt file on the webserver. Be sure to include in robots.txt a ban on crawling ads from Google Adsense and DoubleClick links. Otherwise, the site’s ranking in the search engine will decrease. 

It is forbidden to participate in link exchanges and affiliate programs without creating unique content, using hidden redirects, doorways, irrelevant keywords, etc.

Once your site has been verified that it meets all of the Google News requirements, you can submit an application to join the system. Before the submission of the application itself, you will need to confirm that you are not breaking the rules: you have not previously submitted to participate in Google News, the content is unique, information about the authors and the resource is available, there is no advertising, the technical parameters are met, you are ready to provide information about yourself and website.

Then you need to fill out detailed information about the site: how many authors work on the site, at which URLs you can find the publisher’s contact information and information about the authors, characteristics of the site itself (domain, country, type of information, language. Moreover, a separate application must be submitted for each language version, addresses of news sections and news topics, detailed contact information for the publisher.

When Google News has approved your site, it is recommended that you submit your Google News Sitemap to Support through your Webmaster Tool account. A news sitemap contains news articles published on your site in the last two days and allows you to improve the search for articles on the site, provide a complete overview of all news, more accurately identify news materials, and add metadata to articles. This file is especially useful for new sites and sites with dynamic content. However, it does not affect the ranking of news in the Google News Feed.

For your news videos to appear on Google News, you need to create a separate YouTube channel and send a link to it to the News admins. The video requires good quality, news character, and a clear text commentary.

Read and follow all the steps in this article to add a page to Google News. If you succeed, you will definitely see an increase in traffic to your site. You will have to wait 60 days to re-add the page to Google News in case of failure. Or you can immediately seek the help of professionals to check all the service requirements and the possibility of adding.