Google News Now Open to All Publishers

Be a Journalist

Getting your blog featured on Google News makes a difference in many ways. Not the least is that it automatically notches up your Authority and puts the article in an expert and trusted class. This will improve trust and set you apart from others.

Not all posts will get into news however, as both the quality of the post and the author can have an affect on this. Google will not approve rubbish authors who are known for spam or affiliate marketing and that are not going to make the grade. Your article also has to follow basic standards of journalism.

Major Traffic Boost with Google News

Neil Patel says you can get thousands of clicks to your site from Google News. In fact, he say your visits can jump by over 300%.

“Smart bloggers, news publishers, and digital content marketers are already tapping into this huge resource for targeted traffic and better search engine visibility. As an example, Search Engine Watch increased its average monthly visits from the Google News sitemap by 329%.”

Well, we can’t all be like Search Engine Watch and it’s not likely that a small hotel or your average blogging site will see this kind of return. Being in Google News is certainly going to increase your visibility and traffic. Google News drives 6 billion clicks per month to publishers all over the world. That’s a lot of traffic.

How to Get your Blogs on Google News

You best bet is to work with an author who can do the work for you. You don’t have to be an accredited author to get on the news. As Google says, news is “newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events.”

When you look at Google News, you will see that Google is not totally focused on news-related “current events” content. There is now a level playing field for bloggers and all digital media publishers who have quality content and good insights. Style, substance and good journalism still matter. Honesty and objectivity are essential to making it to the newsstand.

It’s vital that your articles are properly structured with links to other quality sites using anchor texts and meta tags that are descriptive and not promotional. It helps to be an expert and write with an authoritative voice. Good journalists research the subject deeply and do not write for search engine optimization. You will still need to Optimize Your Content for SEO.

You must not however write for the news editors as they will decide if the blog is newsworthy. Editors like information to be in order, by the level of importance. So put your best insights and most interesting points first. It must be original and accurate. Be sure that your sources are impeccable and that you credit all original work.

Use Natural Links & Anchor-text

Linking back to your site from a GNA site must be natural. Keywords in Anchor-Text are often a flag to Google that it is promotional. Many GNA site are using only generic text like: read more, view more, check this, visit here, sitename, site name, sitename.com, www.site.com, this, website, web site, here, this website, click here, BrandName

Promoting Your Blogs and News

You can’t just get in the news and forget it. Like everything else on the Internet, you need to have people looking at it and other sites linking to it.

Blog About Your Featured News
Add an announcement about this to your website blog. Also add it to other sites via Guest Blog and link to it from relevant pages where it will make sense.

As an Example: In the image above, you will see one of our articles on “7 tips on how to plan a smooth vacation“. The image above links to the Google News search page that currently displays the blog. We also linked the actual blog with anchor text that simply says Plan A Smooth Vacation. That gives a valid link that will be tracked by the Google Algorithm and added to its rating.

This is the sort of syndication you need to do to keep your news alive for as long as possible. It will not stay on the news site forever, as news is supposed to be current. However, if it’s a popular article and has good quality links to it, it will get to the top of the list and stay there longer.

Bookmark It

Social Bookmarks are not the highest quality authority links but, done right, they will help. A good strategy is to post an announcement of being featured on your top social sites – LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and Scoop.it. Do more 3rd party bookmarks to the blogs and guest posts you created above. This will create a good chain link structure and boost the ranking for your featured news content.

Get Your Website Google News Approved

Getting Your Site Ready

If your content isn’t news, it will not get approved. Google is looking for content that might appear in Media sites like the NYT and it will not  accept content that is for promotional. It will not accept product reviews, hotel promotions, island wedding, tour descriptions, tutorials, job postings, and other non-journalistic informational articles.

According to Google “News content should be timely, authoritative, focus on current events, and attempt to adhere to journalistic standards”

Google News also require compliance with its formatting and technical requirements that are listed at  Google News technical requirements

Here a quick summary of several important requirements.

• Permanent section headers — No Dynamic organization. Must be permanent and accessible. News should be organization into sections if they cover many topics.
• Permanent URLs — For a “news of the day,” page which changes regularly will not be eligible.
• HTML format — It must be HTML formatted to best practices.  Define the content type, name of your publication, language, access (subscription or registration), genre, publication date (W3C format)
• Site Structure- Use a Magazine Style theme with sections for each type of news: Education, Entertainment, Politics, Technology, Tourism and so on.
• About Us – Contact Us – Authors – Media  Kit Pages
• Meta Tags and SEO Optimize. This goes without saying, You have to optimize your page with titles, heading, image-altags, keyword focus and meta-tags.
• Site Map -A Google News Sitemap is a great way to further segment your news content.

Navigation and Naming

Don’t call you news site a BLOG. the address you want is NEWS – so for example https://barbados.org/blog is a great site for stroies about island news, activities, tours, visitors stories, reviews and product descriptions. It is not appropriate to just add a NEWS section as it will be diluted with what is essentially not news.

The URL should be Yourbrand.com/News

A distinct Navigation might be

Barbados | Business | Technology |  Tourism | Lifestyles | Entertainment |  Education

Submitting Your Website to Google News

You need to apply at Google Publishing Center. Google will check that your site qualifies and follows their guidelines. Choose your News Page/Blog to submit and make sure it is newsworthy. Edit out any articles that are not high quality. Google will not accept all self-serving content or anything that is too promotional.

For More on Syndication and Content Optimization

Check out our related pages on Optimizing Content
See our Book Series on Digital Media

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