In November I blogged about getting more from the SERPs in which I discussed Local Listings, Shopping results and Image Optimisation. I thought I’d cover more about Google News in this blog.
Google News results also appear in the SERPs on many searches now and getting your latest news featured in this section is another great way of making the most of the SERPs.
Registering for Google news is slightly different from standard SEO but is a useful extra promotion tool for your website. If you have an industry news section on your site, fed by a news content marketing service, then you are on the way towards being able to become a Google News provider.
There are a few things that need to be done to ensure that your news feed is accepted to Google.
Firstly you need to provide news content regularly and written by at least 3 authors. When publishing the news items on your site make sure that the author name is visible on the page along with the date the news piece was published. All news items on the site should exist in a permanent location and not one that will move, as this ensures Google can include your results. This is also important as Google have said that they will now recrawl existing news items meaning that if you make any changes to older news items they will be reflected in Google’s results and not just a snap shot of the item when it went live.
Secondly you need to create a Google News sitemap file. This is a XML sitemap similar to the one you should already have on your site but it contains specific information about the news. Google have recently announced some changes to the format of these XML sitemaps that you need to ensure you are aware of before April 2010. These changes do actually make the process of registering news easier as you no longer have to include a 3 digit number into the URL of the news item. More information about the changes to Google Sitemaps can be found on the Google News blog
The removal of the need for a 3 digit code in the URL is a new thing from Google which has come out with the changes to their sitemap format for news. The Google News website still mentions the needs for a 3 digit code in the URL of news article, however it does confirm that the need to do this has been waived using the new sitemap format.
As content marketing becomes more important to the promotion of your website it becomes more and more important to ensure that the content you are creating is being distributed in as many channels as possible. So getting accepted as a Google News provider is a step towards getting the most from all the hard work you’ve put into the content of your website..
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