Google News search is one of the most commonly overlooked sources of web traffic available. While it trails in reach compared to Yahoo News and MSNBC, it gets far more than enough users to significantly boost your site's traffic once you get listed.
And, unlike Yahoo and MSNBC, you actually have a great deal of control over getting your site listed there. If you have a blog or are covering events and news related to your industry, there's no reason you shouldn't tap into this free and steady stream of user traffic.
Getting listed in Google News is actually fairly easy, but it does require following a precise series of steps and your site's profile must exactly match what Google wants to include. This involves how you structure your web pages as well as what topics you cover and how often. Let's start with the basics.
What Types of Pages are Included in Google News?
To be included in Google News you must have a news site. Duh, right? But it's an important distinction. You can't just submit individual articles or press releases that you think are newsworthy. Instead, Google looks at your overall site (or rather, the overall news section of your site) and decides if it's the type of site they want to regularly crawl and include stories from.
That means that your site needs to have...
- a focus on covering current events in your industry, and
- a record of being regularly updated at least a few times a week for the past three months or more (an article a day seems to work best).
If your news section is mainly about touting the wonderful accomplishments of your own business then it's unlikely to be included. Google wants industry news, not self-promotional pablum. And they want to know that you'll be providing current and engaging content on a regular basis.
Also, be aware that Google Newsbot does not crawl RSS feeds. It's fine to have these feeds available on your site for your users, but your content must also appear in plain HTML if you want Google to find and crawl it. Content in other formats, such as PDF or Flash, will also not be crawled.
How do I Structure My Pages to Appear in Google News?
To appear in Google News, your pages must be precisely formatted to conform to Google's exacting technical requirements. Miss any one of these details and your pages will be omitted from the Google News crawl.
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URLs. It sounds odd, but your news article URLs must contain a unique number of at least three digits. This is often mentioned by Google as a vital technical requirement. Although you'll see exceptions to this rule, if you want to be included it's a good idea to follow it.
Two digits won't cut it. So if your URLs look like:
http://www.yoursite.com/news/news-article42.html
...you can pretty much guarantee that your site won't be included. Likewise, if the only number in your URLs is four digits that look like a year, such as:
http://www.yoursite.com/news/news-article2007.html
...your pages will also be rejected. Google recommends using at least three digits, such as:
http://www.yoursite.com/news/news-article123.html
However, the obvious problem there is that if you're publishing articles with three digits in the URL and you're auto-incrementing the digits for each article (article123.html, article124.html, article125.html, and so on) before long you're going to be up to article1000.html, which means you'll be using the four digit numbers Google doesn't like.
To avoid, this we recommend starting with a five digit number (such as article12345.html) and auto-incrementing from there. Here's a sample of the types of URLs currently appearing in Google News:
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3678476
http://business.techwhack.com/2502/blake-jorgensen/
http://www.fin24.co.za/articles/business/display_article.aspx?
Nav=ns&lvl2=buss&ArticleID=1518-1786_2115427
http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/05/18/google-yahoo-
click-fraud-range-set-at-10-to-15/
http://www.toptechnews.com/news/Fair-Isaac-Study-
Examines-Click-Fraud/story.xhtml?story_id=102009DGTB5UAs you can see, a few contain the precarious four digit sequence and yet manage to be included. This may have to do with the authority of the site allowing them to get around the rules. Again, to ensure your site is included as easily as possible, use at least three digits while avoiding four. Our best recommendation is to begin your sequencing with five.
Each news article must also have a unique URL that doesn't change. That means each news article has its own dedicated page. Don't make the same content accessible from multiple URLs and don't have multiple different articles displayed on the same page. Besides, that's just simply good SEO advice to begin with.
For example, if at the end of the month the URL of your news page changes from...
http://yoursite.com/novembernews.html
...to...
http://yoursite.com/decembernews.html
..Google will continue to crawl the http://yoursite.com/novembernews.html page and won't be able to find your new December content.
Instead, use a permanent URL which has HTML links to your news content. For example,
http://yoursite.com/news/
This could be a permanent page which always links to the unique URLs for the ten most recent stories you've posted (with the rest being archived). That way, Google can always know to come back and crawl that page to find your latest stories. Fortunately, most blogging software is set up to work this way automatically.
The unique URL rule also means that Google Newsbot doesn't like frames either, as they display several URLs within the same page. Remember, the rule is this: One permanent and unique URL for each article you publish.
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Titles. Just as you do when optimizing your pages for regular search, put your strategically chosen keywords in the title of your news articles. That's how Google will know to display your article for a given news search. Remember to also craft an interesting title that compels people to click on it. Always bear in mind that a typical news search page will have lots of articles with titles that are all competing for attention. If you expect to get clicks, you'll need to make your titles stand out in a crowd.
Beyond that there are no technical requirements for your title tags. However, the title that's displayed at the top of your article
tag, but rather the article title which is visible to users on the page) (not the page title, which goes in a should not be a link. For example, a story like this one, with the title Microsoft unveils its growth program would have no problem appearing in Google News, since the title's not a link. But a story such as this one where the title Guy Kawasaki for Microsoft's Next CEO is also a link could have trouble being included.Instead, put your titles in an H1 tag, then place a permalink to the article at the end of the story. Make sure to use the keywords you want the site to rank for in that permalink, since they will count as anchor text pointing at the page. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, but Google does appear to have a much easier time displaying the correct headline for your articles if you avoid making your titles links.
Finally, don't make your titles too long. Google requires that your news article titles be between two and 22 words.
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Links. Make your links plain vanilla HTML. Google Newsbot is even worse at crawling JavaScript links than the regular Googlebot is. Again, having crawlable links is just good SEO. Newsbot also does not crawl image links. Use straight HTML links instead.
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Validated code helps to make things easy on Newsbot (remember, it's a bit more fragile than the regular Googlebot) but validation is not 100% required. Google Newsbot also prefers your pages to be UTF-8 encoded. That just means that you place the following meta tag at the top of your pages:
...and that your pages validate using a tool like the W3C Markup Validation Service (select utf-8 (Unicode, worldwide) and HTML 4.01 Transitional for best results). Again, this validation isn't required but it helps.
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Images. This can be a big one, not so much for getting your site listed but for getting people to click on your listing. Take a look at a typical Google News page. See all those images along the left-hand side? You can bet those guys are getting a lot more clicks than the guys who just have text links. The good news is that images are relatively cheap (sometimes free) and easy to get. Here's a list of sources to begin with:
Stock.XCHNG(free)
MorgueFile.com (free)
iStockPhoto.com (cheap)
IndexStock.com (cheap)
BigStockPhoto.com (cheap)
EveryStockPhoto.com (free photo search engine)As noted, if Google decides to use your image on their search results page it can significantly increase click-throughs. Here are Google's specific guidelines to maximize the chances of your images being displayed in Google News:
* Label your images with well-written captions.
* Make sure that your images are fairly large in size.
* Use images that have reasonable aspect ratios.
* Ensure that your images are inline (not clickable).
* Place your images near their respective article titles.In our experience, most images included are between 100 x 100 pixels and 300 x 300 pixels—no bigger and no smaller. However, making the images links is a bad idea because image-links tend to get rejected. And, as Google mentioned, placing your image high on the page near the article title helps quite a bit. These strategies will also help your images show up in the recently released Google News Image Search.
| | How do I Submit My Site to Google News? |
Each site is hand-reviewed by a human editor before being included in Google News. Once included, the computer algorithms take over and decide which keywords to list your articles for and where in Google News your articles will rank. This second, automated part works identically to Google's regular search rankings—keywords in title tags and body content determine your relevance to a given search while the number and quality of other sites linking to you determines how high your articles will rank.
The automated part is easy; simply optimize your articles and build links as you would for any web page. It's the human review that's a little more tricky. Here's what you'll need to do:
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Have at least three month's worth of posts. The longer you've been regularly posting to the news section of your site the better. You must prove to Google that your site is real and that it's committed to providing current commentary on topics within your industry. Occasionally you'll see a site get in faster if it was launched with a lot of publicity, but if you're a relative unknown you'll need to have the site running for a while first.
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Use multiple authors and editors. If your site is a one-person operation then it's unlikely to be listed with Google. In general, at least three writers and an editor or two is required to get listed. And be sure to give these writers and editors profiles that are easy to find so that when the human reviewer comes to your site they can easily see who is writing for you and how many people you have on staff. Again, there are exceptions, but this is the rule. One thing's for sure: We've never seen a one-person site get listed in Google News.
Along those same lines, have an about us link prominently displayed so that the Google human reviewer can see that you're a company and not just an one-person show. Also make sure you have links to your company's editorial policy, disclaimer, user agreement and privacy policy. To get an idea of what these pages should cover, try reading the ones used by other sites. You'll find links to them near the bottom of most pages listed in Google News, but crafting your own is something you'll need to discuss with qualified legal counsel.
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Toot your own horn. When submitting your site to Google News, don't be afraid to tell them how great you are. Tell them about who's writing for your site, any awards your site or authors have received, any relationships with or links you've gotten from other highly authoritative sites in your industry, your traffic stats, and demonstrate that you've read and complied with all technical requirements.
Think of it sort of like applying to college. You've got to give Google's editors a good background on your site and a compelling case as to why your site should be included.
Fortunately, if you're rejected, Google is usually pretty clear about telling you why so you'll know what to fix before you reapply. Once your site is completely ready, you can submit it to Google News at:
https://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py
You can also submit your site to Google News via Google Sitemaps.
| | How do I Create a Google News Sitemap? |
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A Google News Sitemap is just like a regular XML Sitemap (formerly known as a Google Sitemap) except that there are also tags for publication date and tags for keywords describing the article. For finance-related sites there's also an optional stock ticker tag.
As we noted previously, it's crucial that Google know the publication date of your article so we highly recommend using the publication date tag. You can find detailed information on these tags on this Google help page.
Note also that Google News Sitemaps are limited to 1000 URLs. If you need to list more URLs in your sitemap, split it up into multiple files.
Breaking News...You've Reached the End of This Report!
So there you have it, just about everything you could ever want to know about getting your site listed in Google News. In case you missed it, that submission page is at:
We also highly recommend you create a Google News Sitemap and make full use of the publication date tag. As luck would have it, Google just recently released a significant upgrade to their Help for Publishers page, and they've got a great Google News Help Group. So if you've still got any questions after reading this opus, you're sure to find the answer there.
Now go make some news!
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