Getting Started Publishing on Google News

The New York Times, CNN, and Yahoo News each get more traffic than Google News, but in a given month Google News sends almost a billion clicks to publishers worldwide, which makes it an incredibly compelling syndication platform for sites with newsworthy content.

But how do you get articles indexed and ranking in Google News? And how can you get your article snippets to appear in the SERPs for Google web search?

In an attempt to answer some of the basic questions around getting started, this post builds off the information provided in the Google News publisher help center and in Maile Ohye’s awesome video on Google News to provide publishers with a basic primer of factors to consider before submitting to Google News.

Google News SERPs

One of the best parts of Google News is that news snippets are not just included among the news results on Google News. They also often appear amidst the organic search results for Google web search in the form of a Google News one box.

Getting Articles Discovered

Indexation: Google News’ bot discovers content in one of two ways: through a discovery crawl where it sees new URLs and crawls them, or through a news sitemap. Discovery crawls are often broad and deep, but just as XML sitemaps are a great way to help Googlebot discover new website content, news sitemaps are a great way to ensure content gets crawled and to push meta information. To create a news Sitemap read the Google News’ sitemap documentation. Or, if you run WordPress, you can run the Google News Sitemap Generator plugin. It’s also important to note that as Vanessa Fox wrote about on Search Engine Land, Google News recently changed their news sitemap protocol.

Re-Crawl: Typically the initial discovery process is fast and it takes just a few minutes for your content to be crawled. But it’s important to note that if you make changes to your article, Google News will come back. Generally Googlebot-News re-crawls for new content within about 12 hours.

Exclusion: For content you do not want indexed by Google News, you can employ the robots exclusion protocol, you can create either a robots.txt file or you can use META tags to identify the documents you want excluded from search results. As Google News’ robots tips explains, either method is effective (however, at SEOmoz, we recommend against blocking with robots.txt whenever possible).  

Categorizing Articles

For any given article Google News tries to classify both topic and location in order to populate the most appropriate sections of the editions in the most appropriate country. This is done through recognition of words and word combinations. For example, if an article contained words such as “democratic,” “political party,” “congressman,” and “voter” it would indicate that the article should be categorized under politics. Similarly, if the same article contained “Chicago,” “Illinois,” and “United States,” this combination of words would indicate the article has greatest relevance in the US, and specifically in Chicago.  

Keyword stuffing is definitely something you want to avoid. Two additional recommendations to help categorize your articles are – #1 put your articles into relevant categories or sub-folders on your own site and – #2 open the article with an explicit “city, state”, the way the above article does. Each are great ways to help categorize without compromising user experience. You can also use the keywords field of your news sitemap.

Ranking Factors

Google News ranks stories in two distinct ways. An oversimplification of this process is that a story rank is first applied which identifies the story topics that are most talked about across the web. Then, once the most popular story topics are identified, each cluster is displayed in descending order based on relevance and interest in the topic. After cluster positions are set, Google News then tries to figure out which articles on each story topic should be included within each cluster.

Story Ranking

Determines which stories rank atop news results based on editorial interest and the amount of coverage the story is getting. Does the article have local interest that appeals only to a niche audience? Or is it a massively popular story with global interest, such as the death of Michael Jackson? Based on the amount of editorial interest, the top story topic will either appear at the top or bottom of the cluster.

Article Ranking

Once Google News has identified the top story clusters, they try to sift through the hundreds or thousands of stories on the topic and surface the most important articles to lead the cluster. Then, they prioritize the additional article links to display within the cluster. Some of the key factors that are looked at when ranking articles include:

• Freshness: Recent, important, and objective articles are what Google News is looking for. So no matter how great your comic strip, op-ed or press release is, it’s not going to be lead a Google News cluster. 

• Citation Rank: For any given story topic, Google News will look at who is citing whom as the original source. For example, if the Seattle Times breaks a story about SEOmoz focusing on building awesome SEO software, then 10 other blogs reference that article, it’s a good indicator that the Seattle Times’ article is the original, most authoritative source on the topic.

• Local Relevance: For geo-targeted stories, greater authority is given to hyper-local publishers. So if there was an important local event such as a shooting in Spokane, Washington, a smaller publication with local trust like the Spokesman-Review might have greater relevance than a bigger publication in a different location.

• Trustworthiness: Click through data over time is something Google News uses as an indicator of trust. This is done less on an individual article basis or on a total click number basis (which would be fairly easy to game), but more on a by category and by country basis. In other words, if the same personal finance blog repeatedly got high click through rates within the business category or in France, it will develop high trust as being a high quality resource for the business category in that particular country.

To maximize traffic from the SERPs in both news and web search, articles need to include images that adhere to Google News’ desired specifications. Additionally, though less imperative, using video can also provide high click through rates and significant traffic.

Images: Articles with images to do better than articles without images. To optimize your article’s images you should:

• Save images as JPEGs – PNG, GIF, and other formats are less optimal.
• Use large images with good aspect ratio.
• Give images descriptive captions and keyword targeted alt text.
• Place good images at the top near the title to help associate the image with the subject matter.
• Put image inline and make it non-clickable.

Video: YouTube is a trusted video hosting platform for Google News. So for best results, setting up a YouTube channel and submitting it to Google News is likely going to be more effective than using other platforms. One thing to be aware of with video is that video can be hard to categorize. So to ensure correct categorization, textual descriptions and transcripts are each great ways to associate videos with subject matter.

• URLs: Create permanent unique URLs with at least 3 digits. Reason being, publishers have historically used article ID=number in their URL strings and this helps show it’s an article and not just a static HTML page. Of course, we’d recommend against dynamic parameters in your URLs (you could rewrite these as static URLs like newssite.com/story/345). If your news publishing system does not have at least 3 digits, you can submit a news sitemap and identify which URLs you want included as news. In general though, you don’t want your URLs to be too long, too short or non-permanent.

• Article Titles: There are a handful of best practices for news article titles, but titles are incredibly important, especially as a way to ensure good categorization. Ideal titles are ones that are keyword rich, indicative of story topics, yet still catchy and compelling to click on.

• Between Title & Body: Putting publication date between the title and body helps the date extractor identify the correct publication date and include it in the snippet. Similarly, you want to make sure there’s no extra text between the article’s title and body in your article’s source. Doing so will make it difficult for Googlebot-News to extract the appropriate snippet to display in the SERPs.

• Article Body: There are a number of article text considerations, but among the most important is that you don’t want to break up your article body. You want sequential paragraphs. This means you should not have elements such as user comments, advertisements, or links to related posts breaking up your content.  

• Inbound Links: Inbound links matter a great deal for web search, but news is fundamentally different in this respect. As Google News’ Josh Cohen said in his interview with Eric Enge, “to be able to build up links over time is just something that isn’t really all that applicable on the news side of things.”

Google News is not a platform for every website or blog, but you also don’t have to be a mega-publisher churning out 10 articles a week to be Google News-worthy. It will help for rankings if you are, but it is not necessary for indexation. So your website or blog is probably more newsworthy than you think. For example, in the tech category you will find the big sites you might expect like TechCrunch, Huffington Post or ZDNet, but amidst the articles from these mega-publishers, you will also find articles from lesser known sites such as gadgetsteria or ithinkdiff, both of which are included in the news results even though you might not think of either as the “most newsworthy” technology sources.

So if your blog is a good fit with one of Google News’ categories, odds are submitting to Google News or submitting to Yahoo News would each be effective methods of distributing content and increasing traffic.