To appear in Google News, you must:
- Consider and optimize ranking factors for news on Google.
- Consider and optimize the technical requirements in Google News.
- Upload optimized sitemap
- Conduct keyword research
- Optimize content
- Measure Performance
In this SEO guide for media we tell you step by step how to do it.
What good is a good newspaper article if it has no readers?
Exactly!
That’s why search engine optimization should always be present when creating news articles.
To do this, you will have to follow some guidelines regarding the quality of your articles and the technical aspects of your portal.
How to appear in Google News?
If the content you publish in your medium does not appear in the News section, you are invisible to the search engine.
According to Search Engine Land, Google News generates 6 billion clicks to websites each month. That’s why you should be there.
The objective of Google News, according to the same search engine , is to promote original journalism and offer different perspectives to users.
Can you pay to be there?
The answer is no:
“Google News does not accept payments for a website to appear earlier or better positioned in search results.”
Keep in mind that the only way to conquer that area of the search engine is to have a website dedicated to the coverage of news events.
You must be a means of communication, yes or yes.
As they mention on Moz :
“Keep in mind that when you apply to be included in Google News, there will be a team of Googlers that will manually review your website to decide whether or not you are worthy of being in that index.”
Google News doesn’t typically include how-to-style articles, job postings, or advice columns in its search.
Factors that influence Google News
Google’s mission for content of any nature is simple:
- Give users the most relevant information available.
- Present information in a digestible way
- Democratize access to information
This means that every note you write should be to the point, presented in the correct format, and based on reliable sources.
In addition, the search engine is also interested in:
Originality
Write independent news with a unique approach. Provide new content, with sources that do not appear in other media.
Each item must have a purpose.
Transparency
Add information on your website about your company and about who writes and edits in the media.
A good practice is to place a box at the end of your texts where the user can read more about the author of the articles.
Add date and time to your content, as well as an About us section where you explain the media’s editorial line. For the former, you can rely on structured data .
Google does not have an editorial point of view , nor does it favor specific approaches. In that sense, don’t worry about trying to fit into a specific camp.
Relevance
It refers to whether or not your news contains the keywords with which the user is making his query.
Do your articles explain what people are looking for?
Prominence
Google, when positioning websites in its news section, evaluates how much importance a given media outlet is giving to the topic in question.
Are you, as a company, doing an exhaustive coverage of the topics with which you want to be located in the first positions of the search engine?
Authority
To drive a lot of traffic to your news, you’ll need to be a trusted source.
Your media outlet must demonstrate that it is an expert in the field, that it is a trustworthy company and that it knows what it is writing about.
The comments left by users and the number of links you receive from other portals will help Google determine your reputation.
If you want to know how to increase your authority, you can see the section that we dedicate to that aspect in our guide on SEO Factors of the Google algorithm .
Making collaborations with other renowned members is a strategy that will help you in that regard.
You can also hire authorized pens to publish in your media outlet. With their Author Rank , they will help you attract more traffic.
Upgrade Degree
Is your text about an event that just happened?
News loses relevance fast, and Google knows it.
Therefore, you should aim for fast coverage of the events and publish as soon as possible, without losing depth and quality in your work.
Now, while you shouldn’t necessarily update your texts to look like new news, if it’s an ongoing event, you need to adjust the content to new details as they happen, as they happen, and ensure your CMS updates the dates on the as you post new information.
Location
Google will display its results depending on where the user doing the search is.
If you are a local media outlet, your greatest competition will be made up of other portals that cover current affairs in your country.
Language
Google News, says Publisher Center Help , doesn’t show websites with articles that contain text in more than one language.
This is because this type of content confuses their algorithm.
If you cover news in several languages, create a specific space in Google News for each language.
Interests (of the user)
Based on the user’s past searches, Google will tailor the content it displays in News and Discover.
usability
This variable refers to whether your website looks good on any device (laptop, tablet, mobile) and whether or not the loading speed helps those users who have a slow connection.
Most users read news on their phone. For this reason, your website should have the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) feature. The definition of this concept, as we explain in our SEO glossary , is as follows:
“Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open source web technology created and maintained primarily by Google. It is a set of tools focused on creating web pages optimized to load quickly on mobile devices.
This is one of the most critical factors. As Michiel Heijmans mentions on the Yoast SEO website :
“We should think of news sites as those portals that we visit the most from our mobile devices. And, let me emphasize, from a variety of applications. This forces us to create websites that adjust to new screen sizes, new applications and, in addition, that the news portals are incredibly fast”.
Media outlets have the advantage of having extensive teams that produce a lot of content.
For this reason, their focus, from the SEO point of view, is not there, but on the speed and ease that they can lend to their readers.
Important regulations :
Google says that advertising and promotional pieces should not take up more space than the main content of the site.
In addition, it does not allow the disclosure of confidential information , or that infringes copyright . Nor does it support explicit sexual content, nor that which incites hatred , violence and crime in general.
If your media covers the area of health, you should take into account the following:
“We do not allow sites intended primarily to provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment for commercial purposes, nor do we allow content from any site that contradicts or is contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence-based best practice.”
Technical requirements in Google News
Google uses its algorithm to track sites that publish news. To help the search engine determine which parts of your portal are informational notes, do the following:
Have static URLs, not dynamic
If the link or address of your news changes frequently and automatically, it will be difficult for Google to understand your site and index its different sections:
“Non-persistent URLs prevent us from crawling new content because we can’t detect the most recent URL to crawl.”
Also, the newsbot cannot crawl images or links that are embedded in JavaScript. Therefore, make sure that all your links are in HTML.
As indicated in Moz :
“Google News, when indexing your content, prioritize speed: try to index articles as quickly as possible. Therefore, any content that requires JavaScript or other scripting languages typically won’t work for Google News. Google has a two-stage indexing process, where the first stage is based on the HTML source code and the second stage is based on a complete rendering of the page, including JavaScript execution.
Make your content accessible
If Google can’t get into your site to archive the content you post, you’ll be invisible.
If you see that your texts do not appear in Google News, you may have blocked your articles by a robots.txt file.
Plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math allow you to disable this option.
Submit your site or content to Google News
The search engine has explained that you no longer need to submit your website to Publisher Center for your business to appear in Google News.
If your portal is a communication medium that produces daily news information, it will be considered to occupy spaces there.
“All they have to do is create high-quality content and comply with Google News content policies.”
Google News Publisher Center
That said, it is convenient that you create an account in the Publisher Center of the search engine, for several reasons:
- You can customize the look and feel of your medium in Google News.
- You will be able to monetize your content with third-party ads.
- You will improve your positioning opportunities, since you can be chosen to appear in Google Play Newsstand, the search engine app that makes it easier for the user to read news.
“Google News staff create topic-based experiences in the Newsstand tab to help users discover new sources they might be interested in. The results are selected and classified using algorithms”. ( source )
In addition, just as it happens with Google Search Console, from the Publishers Center you can notify the search engine that you have published a new news item, section or website.
How to improve your positioning and visibility in Google News (News)?
News sitemap and crawl speed
As we explained in our article on SEO On Page , a sitemap is a plan of your portal that indicates how all the pages that make it up are organized and how they relate to each other.
A sitemap is a roadmap that will help search engines find you faster.
Therefore, your company will be visible to your potential customers in less time.
Media sitemaps are special. They have different characteristics.
In Search Engine Journal and Yoast SEO they point out the following:
- They contain less than 1,000 URLs. If you want to upload more news, create another.
- They have information only from the last two days.
- News items remain archived in the Google directory for 30 days.
- They must be constantly fed by new items.
- They do not need to be recreated every time you post. Update the one you already have.
- They should not be built in Google Sitemap Generator, as they would include URLS that do not correspond to news.
Posting content frequently will help increase the speed with which Google crawls your site, as the search engine will know that each time it goes to it, it finds new information.
However, do not publish to publish. Choose quality over quantity, always .
Other ways to optimize crawling, according to Search Engine Journal , include improving your hosting plan and the loading speed of your website.
How to create the news sitemap?
Yoast SEO, the most famous web positioning plugin in the world, offers a paid application to create a map of your site that meets all the aforementioned characteristics.
Their News SEO for WordPress plugin costs 69 USD per year.
Keyword research
Whenever we talk about positioning we will have to talk about the most relevant terms that your audience uses to search for information.
It doesn’t help that you have the best news if you use phrases that your target doesn’t even know.
For this reason, it is important that you do a keyword study .
To do this analysis, you can follow the same principles that we explain in Keyword research: Use Excel to organize SEO keywords .
However, there are some additional notes that you should take into account:
In Google Trends you can select an option so that your queries only cover the News search engine.
If you do an exhaustive research on trends, you will be able to find out, for example, what are the best dates of the year to do special coverage on topics of national interest.
In addition, you will be able to review, in real time, what words people are Googling certain events with.
Keep in mind that changing a term in a title can be the difference between ranking first or disappearing in the search engine.
Consistency in titles
To position yourself in Google News, it is recommended that the title of your texts be the same in the H1, in the title tag and in any other place on your website where that article is mentioned.
If you want to include more terms, use the subtitles and the content of the news.
structured data
As the search engine itself explains :
“Google Search struggles to interpret the content of pages. To help it, you can give it explicit clues about the meaning of your pages by including structured data, which is a standardized format with which to provide information about pages and classify their content. For example, on a recipe page, you could mark ingredients, cooking time and temperature, or calories, among other details, with structured data.”
In Schema.org you will find the tags related to news content.
Choose the ones that suit the part you are producing and put them in the code of your website.
Simple information architecture
As we explain in our text on SEO On Page , the way your website is organized should not make your users think, nor confuse search engines.
In How to create an SEO website? [Positioning of sites in Google] we also explain that the objective of a good information architecture is:
“Make it easier for Google and your users to navigate within your portal.
How to do that?
Grouping your content into sections, according to the importance they have for your potential customers.
The ideal for your portal to be optimized is that it does not exceed 3 levels deep.
In this way, there will be a precise hierarchy and the access of Google spiders to your website will be much more friendly, in addition to allowing your visitors to navigate in a simple way”.
News sites are constantly growing. Therefore, the way to keep them organized is by making a good choice of categories and tags:
- Which ones could you remove?
- Which ones are you able to group?
- Is there something missing to add?
clean code
Barry Adams , SEO expert for news, explains in Moz the following:
“By clean code I mean that the content of the article in the HTML source code should be one continuous block of code from the title to the end. That tends to result in better and more efficient indexing in Google News…”.
The first rule of clean code is not to interrupt the flow of content with videos, photo galleries, or related articles.
Save these items for other sections or at the end of the article.
Evergreen content and depth in the texts
By definition, news is content that is NOT evergreen.
Why?
Because, as we explained in SEO text writing: How to write a blog article? , an evergreen content is one that has a high value regardless of the season or the year in which we are.
Whatever is inside that text should be relevant for weeks, months and years.
Having these types of pieces on your website will not help you in Google News. However, it’s a good strategy to have robust, non-perishable items to complement your constant news stream.
In this way, you will have a fixed traffic base throughout the year.
Make extensive guides on the topics you cover and let them do the work of attracting new readers to you.
This way you will gain authority and exposure.
On the other hand, if you combine the best of both worlds and your news offers unprecedented depth, it is very likely that you will improve your performance in Google News.
Some recommendations from Search Engine Journal :
- Have your articles written by experts in the field.
- Provide original content in your news: unpublished reports, own investigations, media analysis.
- In your notes, describe both sides of the coin.
- Try to give the reader as much context as possible. Don’t stay in the obvious, share insights .
Photos and videos to improve the content of Google News
In your news, include audiovisual content that complements the written part.
Use images relevant to the story in .jpg, .jpeg, or .png format. and indicate with Schema.org which one you want as a thumbnail.
Don’t forget to add captions and alt text to each photo.
Google News is also capable of tracking the videos of your YouTube channel that you have inserted on your website.
This is what the search engine says about it:
“If you want us to crawl your YouTube channel, make sure you submit your YouTube video content to Google News . You can also insert YouTube videos into your articles or feed with the <iframe> tag.
If you prefer videos in MP4 format, make sure they are embedded in your articles or included in the article feed with Media <RSS> tags, also called Media RSS.
Important: When you share your YouTube channel to Publisher Center, Google may need to verify that you own the channel before you can show video content in Google News.”
Limit user comments
Or, failing that, remove this option from your articles in Google News.
That your readers can comment on your articles, can, according to Google, cause them to be removed from the news ranking.
The reason is that Google bots can sometimes read user-generated content as part of the article’s HTML code and take it as a Google News-specific crawl error .
The 3 most common types of errors caused by UGC are:
- fragmented article
- excess of words
- shortage of words
Your options to prevent this from affecting your article’s ranking are to remove the comments option, load them using iFrame or AJAX, or create a separate sub page of the article for them to load.
How to measure the performance of your website in Google News (News)?
In this area of the search engine you will be able to know if the users found you from the “For you” section, from the search engine or after exploring a particular topic.
You will also observe a flow of behavior in which you will evaluate the path of people before reaching you.
To see this and other data, you must associate your media outlet with Google Analytics from the Google News publisher center.
The steps to do it are here: How to measure the number of readers with Google Analytics .
To differentiate the traffic that comes from Google News from the one that comes from the normal search engine, you can update the following option in Search Console:
If you have additional questions, you can go to Publisher Center Help .
