Google News: Secrets to Get Listed

Okay, okay, so “secrets” has been so misused it is getting pathetic. Fine. But you are still reading this so it seems to still work. Seriously, Google posted this info right on their blog, so it isn’t much of a secret, but since no one really reads their blogs anyway, you could still call it a secret and get away with it.

Onto the info …

So, ever wonder why Google News doesn’t include your articles? You mean, besides that they suck? Oh, okay, they’re good? Sure, I believe you. Let’s look at some Myths and Truths about how to get your articles listed in Google News as revealed by Google:

Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH!!
While having a good image with your article does improve your chance to get your picture shown, it has no impact on the ranking of the article itself. You can check out Google’s Help Center for more info on this.

Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE!!
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after Google has crawled it, the changes won’t be reflected on Google’s site. While Google says it hopes to have the ability to recrawl URLs don’t hold your breath. This one is a low priority.

Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH!!
Google News is constantly looking for the most recent developments in a story. Geting the latest, breaking news articles is very important to Google News. However, whether you publish before, after, or in the midst of when other publishers post articles won’t affect your article ranking. Google’s algorithms (surprise, surprise) take a number of factors into account when choosing the best articles in a cluster. Simply publishing the same story after another publisher won’t help. Additionally, Google says that their system is set up to detect duplicate content and promote the original source of a story. (Note: This is an interesting comment, as I have seen them REPEATEDLY get the original source wrong) They also state that if they detect that a source is constantly rewriting stories in order to game the system, they will flag the source in their system. (Note: “Flag it”? What does that mean? Dog-ear the page in a book? It can’t mean ignore the source, because in two industries I am in, they constantly use a source who rips me off everyday, and nothing has been done - and this has been over a year).

Articles that are just images or video won’t be included TRUE!!
While Google will include articles that contain multimedia content, if the crawler cannot find accompanying text content, it won’t include the article. The bottom line here is that Google is looking for text articles, so if some of your content isn’t text-based, it won’t be included in Google News.

Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH!!
Creating a sitemap for your news articles helps get your content found and spidered; if Google can’t find your content, they can’t rank it. Period. Creating a sitemap does not affect your article rankings; but there are still several reasons that creating a sitemap is a good idea. First, sitemaps give you greater control over which of your articles appear on Google News; they tell Google specifically which articles to crawl. Second, sitemaps allow you to specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date, or keywords that help inform which section of Google News the articles should appear in.

Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE!!
Google’s crawler has been carefully tuned to scour the web for news content. If you drastically change the structure of your site or your page layout, the crawler may have trouble navigating the new design. This is where having a Google Webmaster Account comes in handy.

If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH!!
This one just won’t die, will it? Despite “gurus” stating the opposite, using AdSense doesn’t have any impact upon Google’s ability to crawl or rank your articles. Google has to stay as objective as possible, or they could find themselves getting investigated and going through what Microsoft did in the 90s.

I’m sure they want to avoid that.