How To Add Your Website To Google News Consideration

We all want more organic traffic from Google, but getting those primary above the fold spots continues to get more complicated. Google's dynamic nature means you have to compete for those high rankings constantly. Once

According to an article on The Atlantic, about 4 billion people view Google News results each month, around the same as Yahoo news as per SimliarWeb data. These 8 billion views result in about 2 billion clicks per month.

That's a large chunk of possible readers and customers coming to your website should you even capture a fraction of that traffic.

What is Google News?

Google News is a secondary vertical search engine that collects and aggregates news stories and headlines from thousands of information sources worldwide. Google then displays them based on various factors, including user preferences and interests, relevancy, content freshness, and authority.

Users can access Google News directly by going to https://news.google.com,

or Google will use news feeds as featured snippets for specific topics.

Opening the gates to Google News

Google news was previously a gated community; at a time, it was down to invite-only at Google's discretion. It migrated into a submission process of which Google would manually review your site before accepting your feed requests, but this has changed in the last two years.

Late in 2019, however, Google changed its policy and removed the requirement to submit your site.

Instead, Google states:

"Publishers are automatically considered for Top stories or the News tab of Search. They need to produce high-quality content and comply with Google News content policies."

Google has had several complaints about its biases for specific publications and marginalising independent writers and smaller publications that report on the news.

A good reason, if any, on why they've started to lift requirements on its news section.

In addition, Google want's to push local news sources, which is why they are opening up to new sites and attracting more inventory.

General guidelines

Despite Google opening up to more sources, it doesn't mean it has become a free for all. Google still wants to maintain the integrity of its news sources and will not approve every article you publish, even if you are registered with them.

Google has not been very open about how to get listed more often than not, but there are certain criteria that we can control to encourage Google News listings, namely:

Content types

The obvious qualifier for Google news is that the content must be timely, relevant, and perceived interest to the Google News audience. Google News focuses primarily on trends and content that does not fall into this category includes tips and advice, job adverts, or information-only content such as the weather or stock prices.

Originality & readability

Content has to be accurate and original. If your site has a mixture of self-generated, opinion-based content, press releases and aggregated content, you need to differentiate this.

Expertise & trust

Content that reflects industry-leading expertise has a greater chance of getting into Google News. This content should offer a clear opinion based on expertise and experience within the field. You can add further trust signals, including a physical address, supporting authorship, and telephone numbers, so Google knows you're not a fly by night operation.

Technical guidelines

Google uses algorithm-based processing when it discovers and crawls articles for inclusion in Google News, and several technical factors must be satisfied. Many of these are traditional SEO ranking factors, and others relate specifically to Google News. So making sure all technical SEO aspects are ticked off will help.

Quality guidelines

It's worth stressing again at this point that Google News accepts news content only. Ensure your content exceeds the basic requirements like depth, variation, opinion, expertise, trust, and statistics.

Google News is NOT about forcing all your pages into the feed but getting more eyeballs on the applicable ones. Trying to get all of your pages in is a poor tactic, and you're destined to fail.

Content in most cases will be industry-specific and company-neutral, so it is not marketing or PR-based. Also, while it may include expert quotes and opinions, it cannot be a business advert or anything promotional.

Covering the basics

There are broader areas that can positively impact your Google News eligibility and ranking – many of these are down to getting the basic stuff right.

News content should be clearly labelled as such. It should:

• Have a unique subfolder (i.e., exampledomain.com/news).
• Each news story needs to have a descriptive URL reflecting the content topic. New content needs to be easy to access, load quickly, and be rich in information.
• Content should be supported by fact and independent, and free of sales tones. You should publish news frequently and consistently – every week or every day, for example, rather than ten articles one day and then nothing else for a month.
• Make the content easy to read, share, and engage with – the more user quality signals that come from the content, the better.

Create a news sitemap

By creating a unique sitemap for Google News and submitting this directly to Google, you can take control over the news content items which are meeting or exceeding the Google guidelines criteria and highlight those most likely to deliver the results you are looking for.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

AMPs are lightweight versions of web pages that have been stripped of almost all types of non-text content that could potentially cause slow loading. They tend to get preference in regions where internet bandwidth is not that great and for general mobile news searches.

Meta news keywords tag & editors' picks phased out.

Historically, Google utilised a meta news tag (meta name=" news_keywords") and editors' picks to allow publishers to identify the topics of their articles. These tags have been abused by several sites, which is why Google has opted to ignore them and move towards an AI ranking approach.

Article schema

Differentiating the types of pages on your site can help crawlers understand which page types need to be considered for Google news.

One way to do that is to leverage article schema. This script can be added to your article page templates in the header via the JSON-LD or HTML through the micro-data implementation.

Google publishers submission

Give Google a little push by submitting your site directly to the publishing centre and add more nuance to the submissions of your site.

• Head over to - https://publishercenter.google.com/
• Create a publication
• Add your website
• Verify it with search console
• Add content labels
• Add content sections
• And submit for review

Google publishing centre submission

How to test if you're in Google News

Now, these submissions take time, and I know you may be excited but don't freak out if your content doesn't make it into Google news immediately.

Once you've received an approved submission status from Googe, you can check which articles are currently syndicated by doing the following.

Select the "news" vertical in Google and Search (e.g. site:nichemarket.co.za). But replace this with YOUR domain name.

As seen below, you will see how many (if any) results appear in the news vertical.

nichemarket articles appear in Google news listings

How to track your traffic from Google News?

If you want more oversight on how your articles perform in Google news, you can find data via your sites search console.

• Login to your Google Webmaster account.
• Select search results under the performance section
• Then click search type and filter
• Select news and click apply

The search console will then show you which links are getting the most views and clicks from Google News, which countries the users are from and much more.

Finding news data in search console

Is your site newsworthy?

Do you regularly create content for your site but haven't been able to crack Google news? Let us help you get your site up to code from the technical aspects. Then we can and assist you with the submission process and get your articles considered for Google News queries.

Promote your business

Are you a business owner? Then why not register on nichemarket and put your business in front of thousands of nicheseekers every month. Registering with nichemarket is easy; all you will need to do is head over to our sign up form and follow the instructions. If you require a more detailed guide on how to create your profile or your listing, then we highly recommend you check out the following articles. 

• How to create a nichemarketer profile
• How to create a nichemarket business listing

Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts on SEO and search updates.

• Google Launches Neural Matching Algorithm
• Is Pushing Live Too Many Pages Risky For SEO
• Why Ranking #1 Does Not Always Equal Improved Leads or Sales
• 10 Reasons Why Your Site Doesn't Rank For *Insert Keyword*
• Google Trial More Related Searches On Mobile
• Google Launches Expandable Featured Snippets

Tags: Google News, SEO, Search Engine Optimisation