First, Google must crawl your news articles. There are two ways Googlebot can find your article: either through a discovery crawl or by visiting your news sitemap. A news sitemap is recommended as it allows you to provide greater control about the meta data you provide to Google about a topic. If you want any articles omitted from Google News, you can omit the article using your robots.txt file or through a noindex tag on your website. Google will also recrawl articles after 12 hours to check for updates to stories. Ideally, your articles will have unique URLs with at least three digits. If this isn’t possible, a news sitemap will tell Google what articles should be indexed.

Second, Google groups your article with others of related content. After articles have been discovered by Google, they are classified into topics (such as business, sports, or entertainment) and by region such as US, Canada, or Australia. Google is using words found within the text of your article to group your article. To help Google scan your article for content and understand what your article is about, don’t break up your article into different sections. Plant keywords in your title. Keep press releases and satire separate from your articles so the distinction between the two is clear – Google is not looking to rank press releases in Google News. And put dates between the title and body of the article so Google understands the date range.

Finally, Google ranks articles. PageRank is not as important a factor for Google as new articles will not have had time to develop incoming links. When ranking articles, Google News handles two different types of rankings.

One aspect of ranking is story ranking. When you visit Google news, you will see that all articles about one topic are grouped into a ‘cluster’ or topic. How highly a group of stories ranks is based on “aggregate editorial interest”, that is, the number of different publication issuing articles on a topic along with wire distribution, op/eds and follow up articles. Google is using the amount of material published on a topic to determine where the most public interest is.

Then there is article ranking – the ranking of each story within the story cluster. Many signals determine article ranking, but here are a few significant factors:

- Fresh and New: Recent and original content will rank higher within a story cluster than older stories will, so the public can find the most recent information on a topic easily.

- Duplication of Information: A story that has been cited by other publications is likely to rank higher.

- Personalization: Google will return customized results for users including more local sources and based on your previous content preferences.

- Trusted Sources: Google monitors click through rate to determine which sources are frequently clicked on and are therefore trusted by users. This is also dependent on geographical region and topic area.

If you are using images that you want to show up in Google News results, use a large, in-line .jpeg image with descriptive captions and text. Keep images near the title of an article to ensure it is associated with the article topic.

XML sitemaps are one way to assist Google in finding your content. For more information, see our related post on Google News Sitemaps.


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