Get Indexed and Ranked in Google News

September 12th, 2008 by Ann Smarty | 23 Comments

Google News can bring tons of traffic and boost your site performance. If you own news site and consider it “newsworthy”, getting included in Google news is one of the first thing you should do:

Make sure your site meets all requirements to be included:

Shimon Sandler (and Website Magazine) did a great job listing the factors that will help you get accepted in Google news. I am listing them here with some additions:

Technical requirements:

Article URL’s should consist of at least 3 unique digits, and look static;
Each article name should preferably be H1/H2-tagged and be the same as the page title;
Articles should be published at least 3 times a day;

Overall requirements:

Make sure your site content is unique;
There should be multiple site authors (and a page listing all the authors);
Include your organization information: contact and “about” pages;
The site logo should clearly state what niche the site covers;
Each article should include its author’s name.

Recommended:

Images and videos are good;
Advertising is also good: “it shows there is visitor traffic.”
Add your site to Google news for mobile devices.

After you make sure your site compiles with all the above requirements, submit it for review by Google News team.

Ranking and getting noticed in Google news:

News Sitemaps can help a lot.
Just like with ranking in general search: proper on-site SEO and domain strength are required.
Update frequency also helps: make it more frequent than3 times a day.
Unique news titles (even if you are only republishing referencing the original source) are a must: remember, Google news are filtering out duplicate articles and by making each title (and body content) completely original, you will ensure it will get ranked.
Being fast (if not the first) to publish the news will both attract links and get you higher in Google news.
Too small articles (less than 200 characters) seem to be filtered out.
If you are covering any local news, make sure to include city name (and if possible) zip code on a prominent place of the page (city name should probably be in a page title) to get included in Google local news;
Do your best to include images next to your listing to get more clickthrough:
- Label your images with captions;
- Images should be of medium size (and include image size to its properties);
- Images should be of reasonable aspect ratios.
- Images should be not clickable.
- Images should be near article title.

Comments

23 responses so far ↓

ADMAVEN - The Interactive Advertising Blog on Sep 12, 2008 at 9:18 am

Good tips; you caught a few mistakes that I was making!
TravisV on Sep 12, 2008 at 10:19 am

This is quite helpful … thanks. Apparently Google News is getting more aggressive about more blogs picked up as well. It would be interesting to know what the difference is in Google News’ criteria for the “news sites” it picks up versus the “blogs” (fuzzy line between the two in many cases anyway, right?).
Dainis Graveris on Sep 12, 2008 at 1:33 pm

Big thanks for information! Few mistakes for me too.
Carsten Cumbrowski on Sep 12, 2008 at 3:00 pm

I read the article in Website Services Magazine a few weeks ago as well and almost wrote a post, but the article by Milind Mody was already so short and straight forward that it would be hard to not use a significant amount of what she wrote… which would have created some copyright concerns.

So I put it off .. and now it was posted by several folks already hehe. I suggest to give at least credits were the credits are appropriate.. Nothing again Shimon Sandler, but he didn’t do much work. Credits should go to Milind Mody and Website Services Magazine.

Here is the link to her article on the Website Services Magazine website.

Cheers!
Carsten
Jeremy on Sep 12, 2008 at 10:12 pm

Anyone heard of the new eco seach engine BioGoogle?
Ann Smarty on Sep 13, 2008 at 1:27 am

@Carsten, thank you! Of course, I added the link to the post.
Milind Mody on Sep 13, 2008 at 1:42 am

@ Carsten - Its nice of you to speak on my behalf. Thanks.

@ Ann - Thanks for linking to this article on Website Magazine.

PS :- I am a guy, not a gal ;)
Seo in Abruzzo on Sep 13, 2008 at 3:53 am

That’s incredible, especially point number 6. We struggle every day to make Url seo friendly and what they ask us? To make anti-seo Urls?

Well ok, I’ll pass it over.
Milind Mody on Sep 13, 2008 at 3:58 am

SEO in Abruzzo , I am not sure if point 6 can be termed as anti-seo url.

The original article says this :-

3) Article URL: Each article URL should be unique and contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. The Google News crawler cannot index an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news01.html. It can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news001.html. Google News cannot crawl an article URL with four digits, which resembles a year (http://www.website.com/news2008.html).

Hope this helps.
Seo in Abruzzo on Sep 13, 2008 at 4:10 am

@Milind Mody
I mean point 6 of original article of Shimon. Anyway the tech spec about the “at least three unique digit” reported also by the google faq.
Milind Mody on Sep 13, 2008 at 4:21 am

“at least three unique digit” - I can understand. A lot of publishers complain about this. Not many CMS have 3 or more digits as a “default” option.
Eric on Sep 13, 2008 at 3:31 pm

Multiple authors makes me wonder also. Why multiple authors? One dedicated blogger can’t write news worthy stories? Well, I guess Google knows much better than I.
seo consultancy on Sep 14, 2008 at 1:52 am

interesting point: “Do your best to include images next to your listing to get more clickthrough:” I tend just to write content but will start to introduce images. Thanks for the tips Ann
Deep Arora on Sep 14, 2008 at 10:41 am

Thanks for the tips, they were very helpful. Sometimes I do a lot of short-cuts in submitting my URLs to google.com . Soon to realize that I should have carefully thought about what I needed to write.

You won’t be found if you haven’t cared listing down all things that will aid people to find you.

You’ve listed quite a few tips on other things. Thanks for that.

keep up the good work!

- Deep Arora
J U Hasan on Sep 14, 2008 at 1:04 pm

Excellent article … thanks a lot for sharing.

I always wondered what’s the requirements for Google news and this article is enough to describe all of them.
Jimmy Boyd on Sep 15, 2008 at 1:34 pm

Does anyone know how long after you submit it for review do you get an answer?
Milind Mody on Sep 15, 2008 at 1:43 pm

Last year the response time varied from 1 day to a week. I don’t have stats for this year (will have to search for it).
David on Sep 16, 2008 at 6:23 am

Or just be a news paper, have an old story from 2002, have a few folks hit on it, and wait for GoogleBot to decide it’s current, and make a major airline loose around a billion.

Sorry but until Google explains that one away, the exception to the rule is going to be the rule…

http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/online_examiner/?p=1815
Lance on Sep 16, 2008 at 3:19 pm

Be careful with your meta tags and opening text or you could have this happen..

http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Google_News_Fail
Dante Monteverde on Sep 24, 2008 at 7:50 am

Ann great post!

Milind, great article. I just got back from Blogworld in Las Vegas where the article got great positive feedback from people visiting the WebsiteMagazine.com booth.
Milind Mody on Sep 24, 2008 at 7:59 am

Thanks Dante!

Really Appreciate your feedback! Great to know that people at Blogworld liked this article.
Budget Hotels In Delhi on Sep 29, 2008 at 2:25 am

thanx for the article.One dedicated blogger can’t write news worthy stories? Well, I guess Google knows much better than I.
vinay on Oct 3, 2008 at 5:40 am

Thank you for the wonderful tips.

I still wonder why google need 3 digit number in article URLs

Thanks
Vinay