Many sites create quality content every day, but the audience reached by this content is limited because it is not referenced in Google News.
In this article, we’ll explore common pitfalls that prevent businesses from appearing in Google News and discuss practical tips and advice for getting your content included in the future.
Google News organizes a significant part of world news and makes it accessible to its users, by providing them with useful articles. But the world of news, media and blogging is so saturated, with a massive amount of articles published daily, there are only a limited number of these articles that will be selected to appear on Google News.
If you want to know how to integrate your quality content into Google Newsthis article is made for you !
What is Google News?
Google News is a computer generated search engine which collects and aggregates news and headlines from more than 50,000 news sources around the world.
Google then displays them based on user preferences and interests, or through search filtering. You can access Google News directly by going to https://news.google.fr/ or by selecting the ‘News’ section under the main search bar on the Google home page.
Here’s an example of what the Google News home page looks like:
Why list your site on Google News?
The obvious answers to this question from a theoretical perspective are brand, expertise and service reach, visibility and traffic (some of which will ultimately generate increased sales).
In reality, however, the answer is more complex.
More than 60% of people trust Google News. This level of trust opens the door to broader business value beyond the traditional search metrics of impressions, traffic, and revenue. Trust can be a central element of online differentiation between brands and websites, impacting user behavior pre-click (advertising) and post-click (website).
For many businesses, SEO in Google News is another way to further exploit the content. When you invest a lot of time, money, and resources into any area of your site, you need to make that investment worthwhile.
Omitting Google News, or simply not seeing the potential in it, can be a fairly common omission.
As with all Google search results, there are clear guidelines and practices that should serve as the basis for your content to be included and ranked highly in Google News.
In the following sections, the focus is on the basic guidelines you should follow to have a chance to be listed on Google News.
General guidelines for getting listed on Google News
Content Types: As you can imagine, the content needs to be relevant and provide real value to the Google News audience. Certain types of content do not fall into this category, such as tips and tricks, job offers or informational content, such as weather or stock prices.
Originality and clarity: The content must be precise and clear. If your site has a mix of self-generated content (curation), you need to clearly differentiate it, otherwise none of it will enter (or stay) in Google News. The content created should be well-written and free from excessive distractions (ads, videos, etc.). Quality comes first.
Expertise and confidence: Content that reflects your expertise is more likely to be referenced in Google News. It should offer a clear opinion, based on experience acquired in the field, and be supported by signals of trust. (name of the author in particular)
Technical guidelines for being listed on Google News
Google News, like basic natural referencing, relies on a precise algorithm and many factors go into it. Many of these factors are traditional SEO ranking factors and others relate specifically to Google News. The main criteria are:
- Your site URLs should describe your content and be unique.
- 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 must be accessible to Google robots for crawling.
Content Quality Guidelines
Quality is present in every aspect of Google’s philosophy. If you’re not sure what determines content quality, take a look at the Webmaster Quality Guidelines, and look at your content objectively so you can compare it to top-ranking sites on the same topic. Make sure your content exceeds basic requirements, such as depth, variation, opinion, expertise, trust and statistics.
It is also interesting to emphasize once again that Google News only accepts news type content. Trying to SEO all of your pages is a bad tactic and you are doomed to failure.
In most cases, the content indexed in Google News is industry-specific and neutral, so it cannot be an advertisement or anything promotional.
Google News tips and best practices
There are a number of other tactics that can be employed to help you rank your site in Google News, here are some of the best practices.
Google News sitemap: By creating a unique Google News sitemap and submitting it directly to Google, you can take control of which news content meets or exceeds Google’s guidelines, and highlight those that are most likely to provide the results you are looking for. As with all sitemaps, this can speed up and improve your Google SEO since robots will find your content more easily and index it more quickly.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): Your AMP pages are versions of web pages that have been stripped of almost all types of non-textual content that could cause slow loading. AMP pages are primarily aimed at publishers and mobile searchers, because people want to be able to access your content quickly regardless of platform and internet connection speed.
Submit your website: Before submitting, check that your content is not already indexed naturally. You’ll be surprised how many website owners forget to go through the application process (which is much quicker to get a site indexed).
You may also like: Improve your local SEO simply
Reference your site on Google News in brief
- Publish unique, high-quality content.
- The content should be well-written and engaging.
- Publish regularly, at least three articles per day, more if possible.
- Separate your content so that only news articles are submitted to Google News.
- Google News excludes articles such as how-tos and job offers.
- Use relevant images.
- If possible, have multiple authors.
- Use advertisements sparingly.
- Have a “Contact” and “About” page.
- Use a professional WordPress (or other CMS) theme.
- Configure and verify your website in Google Webmaster Tools for Google News.
Once your site meets these criteria, it’s time to submit your site to the Google News Publishing Center for approval.