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Aleksander Janicki
Table of contents:
- What is Google News?
- How was Google News created?
- How does Google News work?
- Google News. How to add a site?
- How to check if my portal appears on Google News?
- How to be on Google News, how to gain a following? Tips for publishers and internet portal owners
- Author of the publication
- Publication and update dates of the article
- Photo or thumbnail of the article
- Location
- Follow trends, anticipate, and prepare for different variations of events
- Original content
- One category = higher chances of success
- Don't get wound up (and don't get discouraged)!
- Does CMS have an impact on getting on Google News?
What is Google News?
Google News is an aggregator of information from other sites, mostly the latest news (but not only). It provides quick insight on topics that are quickly gaining popularity.
Google News is a separate Google service available:
- in a Google search on the ‘News’ tab,
- on the dedicated website news.google.com.
- via a mobile app.
News tiles can appear in a special widget, called Top Stories (which contain the most important articles) - after typing in relevant search terms. They appear both when using the search engine on desktop (desktop computers, laptops) and mobile devices (tablets, smartphones).
The rules for appearing on Google News are quite specific. But before we dive into it, let’s talk a little about the service itself.
How was Google News created?
The history of Google News dates back to September 2001, and the service itself is a result of the black day that was the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in the United States.
Internet users, eager to familiarize themselves with updates on the number of casualties and the event in general as quickly as possible, searched for them extensively in their browser. In response, however, they received at least several days' worth of articles, which, for such an event, were already ‘out of date.’
Krishna Bharat, a researcher working at Google, noticed this issue. In response, he developed a news aggregator that, out of all the information appearing on the web, was able to pick out the freshest, most important and reliable information.
Of course, at the time, it was a prototype product, but it quickly gained popularity within the company, and by 2002, it was already available for all Internet users.
How does Google News work?
Google bots analyze the content of all web pages.
By scanning texts and observing how users react to them - i.e. which links interest them, how much time they spend on a given page - they are able to determine with a high degree of accuracy which content is most useful to Internet users.
In the case of Google News, however, the human factor comes into play. To have your site appear on Google News, it's not enough to convince the bots. All sites whose materials are published on Google News are manually authorized by the platform's employees.
In order to receive this authorization and appear in the results on Google News, news stories must meet a number of requirements - first and foremost, they must come from trusted sources (so your portal must be recognized as a trusted, credible source by Google). In addition, the content must be current and original.
Google's goal is to learn what particular audiences like, and deliver it to them. If your site is popular among the people who know it, Google will perhaps adapt to you, not the other way around. So by being true to yourself, you have a chance to stay a step ahead of Google.
There is a way to write about anything and still appear on Google News. If you don't submit your entire portal to the Google Publisher Center service (we'll come back to that in a moment), but only a specific part of it, such as the ‘Sports’ category, then sports news will have a better chance of appearing in the aggregator.
It is worth mentioning that the content presented in Google News is personalized ; users receive content based not only on the above factors, but also on their settings, location, previous activity in Google services, or Google News purchases.
Google News includes such tabs as:
- Your News,
- Local News,
- Selected for You,
- Your Topics,
- For You.
The ‘Your Topics’ tab is divided into different topics, such as Entertainment, Business, Sports, etc.
Google News. How to add a site?
Well, now that you know how Google News works, the question still remains - how to add a site to Google News?
In order for news from your site to have a chance to appear in Google News, you must first create an account in Publisher Center.
After completing the application form according to the instructions attached to it and verifying the right to the domain using Google Search Console, all you have to do is wait for verification.
Once it’s obtained, you can additionally check if everything was successful by typing ‘site:yourdomainadress.com’ in the Google News search box. If it appears, it means it worked.
The possibility of appearing in Google News is one thing, and actually appearing there is another. It requires effort and consistency.
How to check if my portal appears on Google News?
By using the operator site: yourwebsiteaddress.com, enter site: yourwebsiteaddress.com into the search box on the news.google.com website.
By typing the name of your internet portal into the search engine, or the name of the city in which it operates.
If your portal also appears as a source in the sidebar, it means that it has been approved by the Google News service.
The data in this report will appear with a delay - it usually takes up to a few days.
How to be on Google News, how to gain a following? Tips for publishers and internet portal owners
Author of the publication
To increase the credibility of your portal, you need to ensure its transparency. This is measured in a number of ways. One of them is the editorial team.
Each article should have an assigned author, whose profile you can go to and find out more about them, as well as find contact information and links leading to their other articles, social media (if they appear there professionally) etc.
Even if the author prefers to operate anonymously, under a pseudonym, it's still worth creating a profile for them that is accessible to readers so they can find out, for example, what studies they have completed, what experience they have, or what they like to do in their free time.
Publication and update dates of the article
Another important element is dates. Any published content should have a visible date.
If the article has been updated, or edited, it is a good idea to indicate this - for example, by adding a second date with the note ‘updated’.
Avoid artificially updating articles already published.
Photo or thumbnail of the article
In order for an article to appear on Google News, it must have an attached photo. Its width should be no less than 1,200 pixels (the minimum dimensions officially given by Google are 60 x 90 pixels, but we recommend larger sizes to increase the chances of the material showing up in Google Discover as well).
The thumbnail should be consistent with the topic of the article - it should not be misleading, be a logotype (or mostly a logotype), or be created from text alone.
File formats must be supported by Google Graphics. Formats you can use are: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG.
You also should add a well and adequately created caption under the thumbnail.
Location
Another good practice is to mark the location - where the described events took place. If your internet portal does not have a function to add a location, you can simply type it, preferably at the beginning of the title.
For local internet portals, it's a good idea to focus on local sports teams. On such news, make sure to properly mark the location in the article; this way, Google News will accurately recognize which audience it is aimed at.
Follow trends, anticipate and prepare for different variations of events
Once you have met all the conditions and your portal gets authorized by Google News, there is still one step left - you need to consistently create content that will interest your audience and continuously meet Google's standards.
In order to do this, you should follow trends and try to predict what topics will appear on Google News. For example, if there’s a baseball match of a local team soon, then probably many fans will want to read something about it – not only about the final score, but also before the game.
It could be either a reminder that such a game will take place, or a prediction of the score, or some team news – for example about an injury or the tension inside the team. So if your portal has a sports section, it is definitely worth writing an article about it.
What's more, to be ahead of your competition, or at least not be late with the news, you can prepare article drafts on both the victory and defeat of a team of interest to your readers.
You can also use Google Trends, in particular to look at real-time search trends. If you want to find out more about this, check out our guide: What is Google Trends and how to use it?
Original content
High- quality, linguistically correct (without grammatical or spelling errors) original content gets the most recognition by Google News.
If you manage to be the first person to describe an event, and others quote you, and add links to your internet portal on their websites, it will not escape Google's attention.
Quoting is fine, as long as it doesn't make up the overwhelming majority of the text. Writing content based on other people's articles and linking them is ok too.
On the other hand, posting press releases (instead of conveying their message in your own words) or copying other people's articles will not help you appear in Google News (moreover, the latter is illegal).
Avoid weaving sponsored content into news stories, Google News doesn't like it. Creating sponsored content is ok, but separate it from the news.
One category = higher chances of success
Reach is also positively affected by Google's affiliation of your internet portal with a specific topic. If you mainly publish content on one topic, e.g., sports news, there's a greater chance that it's your article on that topic that Google News will pull in.
Conversely, if the spectrum of topics you present is very broad, Google's algorithms may have trouble adequately categorizing your site as a whole, and thus your site's visibility on Google News will be negligible. The solution is to report one selected category of your website.
Artificially fitting into the algorithms to get into Google News is not a good solution. Remember that your portal has a certain audience built up that apparently likes the way it has been run so far. Before trying to reach a new audience, make sure not to lose your current one.
Don't get wound up (and don't get discouraged)!
Google News should be an addition to your reach, not its main source. This is because you can’t be sure that you will appear there regularly. It mainly depends on Google itself.
Therefore, it's better to rely on a built-in, permanent audience base, with the occasional addition of Google News users.
If you give up on publishing certain content to get your site assigned by Google to a certain category (e.g., the aforementioned sports), your existing users may start missing the content they used to visit your site for. And they will switch to your competitors.
To avoid this, carefully plan and separate one category of your internet portal's posts, where you will publish only those articles that you want to be featured on Google News.
Test it, play with it and above all , be patient. The fact that, after 14 days, you are still not on Google News does not at all mean that you will not appear there in some time.
From our experience, it can take weeks as well as months to build visibility in the eyes of Google News.
You can find more tips (mostly technical) from Google here: https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9607104?hl=en.
Once you get on Google News, make sure your articles are also displayed in Google Discover. We write more about this in the guide: Google Discover. What is it and how to get to it?
Does CMS have an impact on getting on Google News?
The CMS itself does not give a 100 percent guarantee of appearing in the service. However, it can be very helpful.
Not every CMS meets the technical requirements of Google News, for example, the most popular Wordpress has to be manually adjusted by the administrator in order to be displayed on Google News.
Therefore, it is wiser to bet on a Google News-compatible CMS right from the start.
The CMS 4media was prepared with publishers and running an online news portal in mind, so it meets the conditions listed in Google's official documentation that are required for an internet portal to get on Google News.
Among other things, it has a news sitemap, specific news article structural data in accordance with schema.org, takes into account the Core Web Vitals, appropriately sized article thumbnails, etc.
The CMS 4media is one of the few content management systems available on the market that increases your chances of getting on Google News right from the start.
So, as a publisher, you don't need to optimize the technical parameters of the CMS, just focus on good practices and registration with the Publisher Center. You don't have to worry about all other technical conditions, because at CMS 4media we took care of them right from the start.
