Most site owners are constantly on the look out for ways to increase their online exposure. Increasing web traffic not only allows for higher brand recognition but also higher revenues. One of the most overlooked methods to achieve this, is to get content syndicated from your website and onto smaller sites or 3rd party aggregators. This provides targeted inbound traffic from the people who have read your content and click through to read more.
One of the largest aggregators of content is Google, and Google News is a great place to get your content displayed – as long as you have relevant newsworthy content that is. Obviously Google doesn’t want just any old content within its news product, so first of all you have to get accepted onto their news crawl.
The first step with getting accepted into Google News should be an internal conversation – “is my content really up to standard?”. If you are running a small blog, then the odds are that you are going to be too small for Google News, so go no further.
Google currently states that it crawls over 4,500 sources of news, with their news algorithm choosing the most relevant and up-to-date items from the most trusted news sources which appear at the top of any news search. The actual number of news sources must now be a lot higher than this now; I alone have 4 web sites feeding news – all be it within niche topic areas.
Suggesting a potential Google News source
If you have a website with a good news section (and by good – I mean updated at least daily), then you can probably get in on the action.
When you suggest your source of news, you are asked to specify the location and the title of the news source. What you enter here will appear with your news items in Google News. It may sound obvious, but News is separated by language, so if you have English news, do not except people in France to see it.
All news article URLs need to be unique, and specifically Google requires a unique four digit (or more) number at the end of the URL of each article. This most probably helps them prevent duplicate news content or the indexing of old news.
There is usually a day or so wait for Google to respond to the source suggestion, after which you should receive an acceptance (as long as the quality of your content is good); otherwise the kind guys over at Google will send an email guidance as to why they have not accepted your site. This could be a technical problem with crawling your content or a rejection on the basis of quality, but if you are able make the changes – simply wait for them to re-crawl your site and you should be auto-accepted. There is no need to re-submit, as the news crawl will see the changes and you will become a Google News source.
Once you start to see your content on Google News, don’t be surprised if the odd news item does not appear in their news index; Google’s algorithm is picky and will choose which items of news make the cut.
The Traffic Generation
With good content, should come a steady increase in traffic – although don’t expect a huge spike overnight. Unless you are a breaking news publisher, Google News is never going to deliver huge volumes, but you will find that it does bring in new unique visitors who stumble across your content.
To increase your chances of high Google News rankings, you could carefully craft the inclusion of current affairs key phrases within your content and article titles. But unless you do this in a very subtle way, you risk harming the relationship with existing site visitors who already enjoy reading your news content.
Subscribe To SearchWeekly for Part 2 of this Google News special – published next week.