How to Get Your Website Featured in Google News
Google News presents stories relevant to user searches in categories like Top Stories, News for You and Following; with its Top Stories section providing breaking news updates.
Content freshness is a critical Google News ranking factor, yet evergreen content on an identical topic is also essential in building up credibility as an expert in Google’s eyes. This will establish you as an authority figure.
1. Originality and Freshness
Google News provides its search engine users with a curated collection of stories on politics, the world, and business topics. If you would like your content included on Google News, register it through Publisher Center and abide by Google’s guidelines for inclusion.
Your content must be both relevant and original for it to rank well on Google News, so avoid syndicating of news articles and use canonical tags when using syndicated material.
Multiple experts have observed that evergreen content ranks highly on Google News. Therefore, it would be wiser to create multiple evergreen articles on a specific topic instead of publishing time-bound posts.
2. Keyword Research
As a content platform, Google News requires more skill and finesse than conventional SEO techniques. While many of the guidelines governing visibility on Google News overlap with Webmaster guidelines, some important differences must also be taken into consideration.
Google News won’t display articles with links to malware or viruses, or that promote terrorist or extremist activities, as well as content that might facilitate serious or immediate harm to people or animals.
Witty puns may make for great printed reading material, but their effectiveness on news platforms may vary significantly. Therefore, headlines should be clear and straightforward without using figurative language that may cause reader confusion; Google News limits how long snippets can be displayed.
3. Link Building
As events change rapidly, news stories must keep up. That requires creating headlines that grab readers’ attention and content that’s clear and concise for quick reading, without confusing or losing readers along the way. It is critical that news stories keep pace with current affairs without losing readers by becoming too lengthy or complex for their readers to follow easily.
Content must also be relevant to search queries; that’s why it’s vitally important to conduct keyword research and ensure you use only relevant terms in your posts.
Google requires articles to comply with its quality guidelines for publishing, which includes not publishing blatant advertising, how-to articles, advice columns or job postings that contain clear advertisements; any terrorist or extremist content as well as violent or gory images.
4. Image Size
Image size is of critical importance in Google News, so make sure that images meet a minimum width requirement of 1200 pixels to ensure they appear in Discover feed.
Make sure to utilize high-quality images. Google does not permit content that contains pornography or graphic violence, nor any hateful or offensive content targeting age, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity.
Google News can be an effective way to promote your business and drive traffic back to your website, but before posting anything it is crucial that you familiarise yourself with all its rules and regulations in order to avoid penalties and increase chances that your articles appear as featured search results or other features.
5. Timeliness
Google News delivers over 6 billion clicks monthly to publishers worldwide, giving them access to an audience. This can lead to greater authority, increased followership, and an enhanced position in search results; but getting featured can be challenging.
Timely articles are key for getting them into Google News. Unlike evergreen content, news articles must address something currently taking place or that occurred recently; otherwise they’re likely to be disregarded by their algorithm and may never appear again in search results.
Therefore, it is recommended to include both the date of publication and modification in your article schemas as well as in XML sitemaps to ensure that articles can be recrawled and ranked as timely content.