HOW TO: Get Your Site Featured On Google News

Google NewsIn this article I’m going to mention both the tips and procedure to get your site featured on Google News – Aggregated headlines and search engine for many news services.

Getting featured on Google News has more advantages rather than traffic and exposure. Once if your site is listed, then Google will keep your site in mind. Same goes for Techmeme, you can also get your blog/site featured there.


Advantages of getting featured

  • Your website/blog will get good exposure.
  • Boosts targeted traffic to your site.
  • You can proudly mention this anywhere!

Basic Steps For Getting Featured

#1 – Verify the ownership of your site using Google Webmaster Tools.

#2 – Submit your sitemap to Google. [Procedure]

#3 – Update your Sitemap as you add new articles. Use Ping services.

#4 – Submit your content to Google. Google can help you reach out to the world by distributing your content on Google Web Search, Maps, Product Search, iGoogle, and more.

Resource : Getting Started – Submitting Your Content

#5 – Suggest news content for inclusion on Google News.


Tips For Getting Your Article Featured

#1 – Original content : If your content is original and genuinely generated by you, then you can maximize the chance of getting featured.

#2 – Response time (website speed) : Also optimize your site’s loading site since Google Search Rankings Considers Site Speed.

Useful : 20+ Tips To Improve Your Blog’s Loading Speed

#3 – Proper Attribution : Give proper attribution or credits to the original source.

#4 – Multiple Authors : You can assure Google about your quality if you have multiple authors. A page listing all the authors would be great.

#5 – Tweak Your Design : Your website should look like a news source. Magazine layout recommended for it.

#6 – About Us and Contact Pages : About and Contact page must be visible on the homepage. Your “Contact” page should have your organization’s name and contact information. Give more information about your company or site on “About” page.

#7 – Article Format : Each article format should have a proper title, author name, publication date and time (optional) and a minimum of 250-300 words in the article body.

#8 – Posting Frequency : You should update at least three new articles every day. The more new articles you add the better.

#9 – Concentrate on niche : By seeing your homepage, they should be clear about what niche or industry your site relates to. Also make sure your site content is unique.

#10 – Satisfy Them : Show awards your site received and your site stats. Show the number of backlinks your site has. Also mention the links available on Google Blog Search.

#11 – Optimize Permalinks : Each article URL should be unique and contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. Also it won’t crawl an article URL with four digits, which resembles a year.

For example, it won’t crawl articles with permalinks like this :

www.hellboundbloggers.com/news/article19.html
www.hellboundbloggers.com/getting-indexed-by-google-news.html

But it will crawl these articles :

www.hellboundbloggers.com/news/20102003/article.html
www.hellboundbloggers.com/news/getting-indexed-by-google-news/5664.html

#12 – Images and videos : Enhance your article/post with images and videos. Don’t forget to optimize the images. You can check some tips to optimize images I provided earlier. Create a Video Sitemap for indexing videos quickly.

#13 – Avoid Updating/Modifying : The Google News crawler only visits the URL of the article once. If you make any changes to the article after Google has crawled it, then the changes will not be reflected on Google’s site. So proofread it!


Google News alone? Do you recommend any other site?

Why not. You can also try your best on Yahoo! News and Techmeme. These sites will also give you more exposure and targeted traffic to your site.

Do you know any other tip for getting featured on Google News easily? Please share it in the comments!

39 thoughts on “HOW TO: Get Your Site Featured On Google News”

  1. Pradeep,

    Here is an excellent piece of content. Well, what’s your take on recently introduced “news_keywords metatag” by Google? Do you think it is really going to empower news writers? What I think is this metatag will be abused to unethically manipulate Google News.

    Reply
    • I was not aware about that bro, I just gave it a look and it seems to be a good move by Google. It helps its search crawlers identify news content. But as long as we put high-quality and interesting news content, this won’t be an issue. 🙂

      Reply
  2. Hi

    How long does it take to get approved, right now it has been 12 days.

    Do you know anyone who is good at designing news sites?

    Reply
  3. Hi Pradeep Kumar,

    I am facing some problem with news.google.com can you tell me solution for the same? My problem is as follows,

    Google news stopped crawling our website bollywoodchaska.com from past 10 days

    Our website bollywoodchaska.com had been in the Google news database from around past 4 months. But from past 10 days Google news has stopped crawling our website for their news section.(even in the webmaster tools the last crawl was 17 Jan 2011 for Google news. now when we submit news site map they say that your website is not in our news database.)

    1.Our server was down 2 times in 3 days due to technical glitch
    2.Due to reporter’s error we made some mistake in publishing the news. As a result of that we removed the news from the website and also published an apology for the same.

    Since we still are upto the Google news quality standards (criteria), can the above reasons be the cause due to which Google news has stopped crawling our website? If so what can be the solution for the same so that Google news reconsiders our website.

    Any reply will be appreciated.

    Regards,
    Minesh Modi
    Bollywoodchaska.com

    Reply
    • Minesh, though server downtime & wrong news are some of the common reasons, still there are other possibilities which you can consider. Maybe your site got a penalty or your competition outranked you.

      You can ask Google to reconsider your site if the server problem is fixed. You can do this via Google Webmaster Tools. 🙂

      Reply
  4. some very nice tips you mentioned, i think the multi-author and the /post-number/ in the url are big factors. However, changing permalinks will be the last thing i would do, but we can surely fulfill the other factors 🙂

    Reply
  5. Very interesting post. I guess the difference between a blog and news site it the frequency of posts and the multiple author team. I am thinking about setting up a site to gather togeather a number of bloggers into one news site. I expect this could be done but on the other hand we could continue to use press release sites. I will look at some of the sites coming up in google news to see what is happening.

    Reply
  6. wow.. thank You for sharing… I was pretty suprised when I saw the link where we can submit the content to the big G…

    have to admit – that was a huge hole in my knowledge 🙂

    have a nice day,
    Helmut

    p.s. gratz on having such a sucessful blog 🙂

    Reply
  7. This is a great information for getting listed in Google News. Can we add our blogs for that?

    Reply
  8. Great tip. Google News is brilliant, it can be a powerful tool for finding super targeted websites to get amazing traffic from.

    Thanks for the post.

    Reply
  9. The tips are very well suited for blogs that are rocking already in the blogosphere.. and for new bie bloggers, these can be used as things to be focused for getting featured 🙂

    Nice post as usual.

    – Robin

    Reply
  10. Nice tips..but I think there is a duration of 6 months to get accepted in Google News! Is that true ?

    Reply
  11. That Cool Buddy I really want to Add my Website news and Blog updates in Google News I had tried many times but Not appear , I will try all the tools

    Reply
  12. Thanks for this guide, I was actually not aware about inclusion of my article to google news. Well is it possible that google will accept article directory on google news?

    Reply
  13. Do I need to have a niche in order to be featured or is it ok if my blog is a personal blog that has flexible topics?

    Reply
  14. Neat, i’ve been thinking about Google news lately, i use it all the time. It would be nice to get some of my sites featured on there. Thanks for the tips!

    Reply
  15. Nice article mate. I am not into the news blog till now. But i have a plan to do. Will keep these things in mind while i start my blog. Thanks mate!

    Reply
  16. Great pointers!

    I do have some questions though.

    1. Do you really think that it’s worth the trouble submitting your content to Google for indexing? We know that it can take months for them to do it, plus you can get your page indexed within a couple of hours using other methods.
    2. 11 – Permalinks. We are talking about this strategy as it applies to being indexed strictly for news, correct?

    Thanks,
    Ana Hoffman

    202 Bite-Sized Tips To Insanely Increase Your Blog Traffic

    Reply
    • Thanks for your valuable Questions Ana!

      1. It’s easy to get indexed in Google Search results. But not possible in the case of Google News. It really depends on how fast you can produce the news and how neatly and visibly it is produced!

      2. Yes. Recommended to contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.

      Reply
  17. You know it’s funny but I’ve done most of what you said to follow the basic guidelines to SEO. It’s interesting how they both have so much in common. Actually pretty much everything you state here should be used to simply have a great blog in general. I would suggest following these tips featured or not.

    Nice list S.Pradeep

    Reply

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