Last edited on July 18, 2021 by Digitiz
As a media or information site, being listed on Google News is often synonymous with generating significant traffic.
To better understand the workings of Google News, here are some explanations as well as an infographic on how to make your content appear in the Google news feed.
How to submit your site to Google News?
To make the request, simply complete the specific Google News form.
Some numbers :
However, taking this step does not guarantee you will be accepted as a news site by Google. As the figures in the infographic show, you should know that even though there are today more than 55,000 indexed sources, only one in five requests is accepted.
If you have made enough effort to be accepted, you will have the opportunity to generate more traffic (provided you are well referenced). It is important to emphasize that Google News reaches 1 billion users worldwide every week with 6 billion clicks.
What are the conditions to appear in Google News?
If to be eligible for Google News simply requires fulfilling a few conditions, being well positioned requires respecting good practices and SEO criteria just like on the classic Google search engine.
Who can access Google News?
However, not everyone can have a presence on Google News. To do this, you must be considered one of the following types of media:
- News site
- Press / TV / radio site
- Blog
- Press release
- Opinion content
Google News themes:
But that’s not all ! It is also necessary to correspond to very specific themes given that Google News classifies its content into subcategories (trending topics) to cover the hot news of the day:
- International information
- Regional information
- Economy
- Science / High-tech
- Culture
- Sport
- Health
To help you publish and optimize your articles on Google News, Google News provides a very comprehensive help center to guide you.
Good practices to follow
How does Google distribute information?
First, the degree of relevance of the news is of course one of the most important criteria. We can imagine that Google can judge this based on the number of requests made in real time by Internet users. However, the notoriety of the source is also very important. A newspaper that Le Monde will of course have more credibility than the small newspaper in your department. The degree of responsiveness is obviously also a fundamental criterion for being visible in Google News.
General Google News eligibility guidelines
Priority to current events: Prioritize hot news topics without hesitating to deal with the same subject several times but from different angles. On the other hand, practical type content, letters from readers or announcements are not taken into account.
Readability and clarity: Spelling and grammar must be impeccable. In addition to fluency in French, readability and layout is an important factor.
Original and unique content: This may seem obvious, but the content must be unique, therefore not be copied or plagiarized on another site. The URL must always be the same and not change.
Respect the ethics of Google News
The responsibility of editors: credibility is important in the eyes of Google and having a team of at least 2 or 3 editors will therefore strengthen it. But transparency should not be neglected either since the biographies and information on the editors must be visible.
Misleading sites: with the scale of Fake News, Google is trying to combat this burden by recently deploying the Fact Check. It is therefore not in the best interest to publish false information to appear in Google News.
Advertisers and publicists: readability must not be spoiled by advertisements or pop-ups. This also applies to promotional content which should not take up more space than the content itself.
SEO optimizations to do for Google News
The On-Page structure
Each article must have its dedicated page. This results in a single URL and non-duplicated content.
Subdomains must be submitted independently to the Google News form.
The encoding must be UTF-8.
Images should be optimized to match the thumbnail format. They must therefore always be in a multiple of 60×80 (portrait) or 80×60 (landscape). The image format must be GIF or JPEG with the “height”, “width” and “alt” attributes specified.
The technical structure
The Keywords Meta Tag allows you to better understand your subject and possibly be included in a “trending topics”
The AMP format is preferred to appear better in Google News on mobiles.
The Google News sitemap should only contain the URLs of articles published in the previous 2 days. This therefore requires that the sitemap be updated very regularly without being replaced by another. However, it must not contain more than 1000 URLs.
Infographic: Google News!
As promised, the infographic produced by the Eskimoz agency based on the article http://www.eskimoz.fr/google-actualites/
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