Google News results come up on many searches within the SERPs now and adding your site as a news provider that Google regularly crawls could lead to your site appearing in the News listings as well as the organic SEO search results and PPC if you do it.
The first thing to do is to go to the Google News homepage and do a site: search for the site (site:www.yourdomain.com) if no results come up then you are not currently viewed as a news provider by Google.
The Google News Providers Help Center provides some technical specifications for what they look for in a news provider. These include the following:
1. News items must be created by Multiple Authors not just the same one
2. News item URLs must be unique and must have a 3 digit code in these – there is a get out of needing the 3 digit code in the URL but it involves you creating a Google News Sitemap
3. Domains number not begin https:// or Javascript and must not end with .jpg, .jpeg, .hqx, .gif, or .zip
4. All news items must be hosted on one domain name
5. Need to make sure that there are not too many parameters in the URL
6. News items must not be imbedded in JavaScript as Google knows that JavaScript can create different display pages for Users than what they see, this is cloaking which Google has banned (it doesn’t matter if you aren’t using JavaScript to cloak Google doesn’t differentiate)
7. Flash Files are also not followed so news items must not be in Flash
8. Don’t use Forum URLs such as
a. /board/ or /boards/
b. /forum/ or /forums/
c. /messageboard/
d. /showthread
e. /?thread or &thread
9. Frames on a website can’t be crawled by Google
10. Make sure that each article is only in one language, new items in two or more languages might not be read correctly
11. Include a list of crawlable links to your articles – perhaps a summary page with a short snippet of the news items with “read more” type links to the full news article.
12. Articles should be text only and not Videos or Podcasts as Google can’t read these yet
13. The URLs of the news items should remain exactly the same and not change at any point, so Google can keep track of where they are
14. News items should not be behind a registration form or sign in process, if this is the case consider first click free for Google.
Some of these issues don’t apply to you but those that might are highlighted in Red.
Once you have met all of these items of Google’s criteria you can request a listing in Google News
However Google don’t always accept these requests and you might have to do a bit of Hoop jumping to get the site included. Once your site has achieved inclusion in these news listings you increase your chances of dominating the SERPs for your industry.
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