Google News sends out over a billion clicks to publishers each month – but how do you get your news articles featured in the Google News listings?
One of the greatest things about getting your content in Google news is that quite often they don’t just appear in the Google News section they also get fed out in-between some of the Google organic SERPS results.
How to get Google to find my news?
There are two main methods either through natural discovery, that is when Google’s News bot finds a new URL and indexes it, the other way is by submitting a News Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools.
How to create a Google news sitemap? Visit http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=74288 and get it from the horses mouth – easier still if you’re using WordPress then simpler install the Google News Sitemap Plugin.
What factors help Ranking in Google News?
There seems to be four main factors that have an effect on the position and ranking of your news in Google News results. They are as follows:
- Freshness
- Authority Rank
- Geolocation
- Trustworthiness
Freshness of Content
You need to be writing news articles that are related to what people are searching for, they need to be unique and fresh – if you are mainly writing generic opinion pieces then forget it your not going to get to the top, but if you’re breaking a story or taking a new slant on a current event then you’re in with a chance of getting there.
Authority Rank
To get to the top of Google’s rankings for a news story you better be sure that people are citing you as the main source, you’ve got to break the story otherwise the news article with the most backlinks is always going to get to the top.
Geolocation of Content
Most news has some kind of location specific content, if you are publishing about the city you live in you can be assured that Google News will normally favour your content.
Trustworthiness – Does Google trust you?
Google News works out how trustworthy your website is by previous click through data, it does this on a category and country basis which is much harder for us SEOs’ to manipulate.
# February 18, 2010 at 2:05 pm
Is this different from the Google XML Sitemaps plugin?
# February 18, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Hello,
It is different from the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. It has different fields and it only includes posts from the last few days rahter than everything.
Check it out at: http://www.southcoastwebsites.co.uk/wordpress/
Regards,
Simon.