Introduction
Google News is a news aggregator and app developed by Google (more on Wikipedia). It provides news articles from the last 30 days from publishers who carry unique, informative and superior quality content.
Google News app is available for iOS and Android, or you can visit the website from your desktop computer.
What are the main benefits of being a part of Google news?
A news publisher who is listed in Google News gains:
- more traffic on the website – Google News sends 6 billion clicks per month to publishers all over the world;
- better ranking – as the informative content is fresh and unique;
- authority status – your brand should be viewed as the Authority Site of the niche you are based on;
- increased authenticity – Google is looking for an authentic brand that is easily trusted by web users ;
- rapid indexing of articles – one of the biggest advantages of being listed in Google News.
Supported languages
For a time being, not all web sites can be a part of Google News. Google currently supports 35 languages:
Afrikaans, Arabic, Bangla, Basque, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Ganda, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese.
How to get to Google News?
In order to get to Google News, a web site should submit an application to Google. Request verification is done by a group of people (not by machines). Google team reviews the website, from which the request is coming from and focuses on its news article content. There are also technical requirements, as a website should support News XML sitemaps and structure data.
Pangea generates the News XML Sitemaps and created NewsArticle structured data for news content.
Google announced some tips on how to succeed in Google News, here is a summary:
Headlines and dates
- Clear headlines – the most prominent text on the page, review our headline tips;
- Accurate times and dates – show one clear date and time (more details in Google date guidelines) and use structured data (the date published and date modified);
- Avoid artificially freshening stories – don't artificially freshen a story without adding significant information or some other compelling reason for the freshening.
Duplicate content
Google News seeks to reward independent, original journalistic content by giving credit to the originating publisher, as both users and publishers would prefer. This means we try not to allow duplicate content — which includes scraped, rewritten, or republished material — to perform better than the original content. More information about content duplicates and how to avoid them here.
Transparency
- Be transparent: Visitors of a website want to trust and understand who publishes it and information about those who have written articles. That's why Google content guidelines stress that content should have posts with clear bylines, information about authors, and contact information for the publication.
- Don't be deceptive: Google content policies do not allow sites or accounts that impersonate any person or organization, or that misrepresent or conceal their ownership or primary purpose. Google does not allow sites or accounts that engage in coordinated activity to mislead users. This includes, but isn't limited to, sites or accounts that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or that direct content at users in another country under false premises.
And at the end, a summarization of tips to be better than competitors for Google News:
- content should have multiple authors;
- content should be updated daily (if relevant);
- a website should consist of mostly unique content (70%), and
- to be an expert on a specific topic/ area
Google News Registration Process
If you would like to request for Google News Index Inclusion or you did any changes in the structure of your site that contains news, please contact Pangea Customer Care team (for RFE sites).
Here is the list of the information Pangea Team need (provided in the site`s language) when contacting Google News Team:
- a brief description of your site (max 1000 characters),
- a city where the Service has a bureau (if not, a city where it should be),
- a list of all zones and sections where you have news content
Before requesting, we would strongly recommend:
- to work on your site and to add more information about your authors in their bio pages in order to prove site ownership and authorship, for example:
- updating metadata (title, meta title, description, keywords) in a zone/ section edit pages (more information about metadata and its use for SEO here).
