17th December, 2012
Google News is a free news aggregator provided and operated by Google Inc. It aims to organise all the world’s news, making it accessible to users, while providing a great online experience for those in search of timely, useful information. Operating via an automatic aggregation algorithm, Google News offers a brilliant opportunity to share your information and expertise with the world.
So exactly how do you arrange to have your website included on Google News?
First of all, it is essential that you can make a good case for inclusion into it. Emphasise the positive aspects of your website – including any awards you have received, the statistics achieved to date, and who currently links to your website.
Ensuring your website is news worthy and relevant is of course essential. It is highly recommended you also provide a historical background of your site, introducing your authors and editors too.
Secondly, there are certain technical requirements that need to be met.
Each page of your website displaying the full text of an article needs to have a unique URL. URL is an abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator and it is the global address of documents and resources on the worldwide web.
It is important that the URL for your full text article does not change, since Google News is not able to include sites that display multiple articles at the same URL.
Similarly, the URL for each article needs to contain a unique number, consisting of no less than three digits. Do not use URLs with dates in them – this will prevent Google from crawling the site for new content, given that dates often change – and Google will be unable to detect the most current URL to be crawled as a result.
The three or more digits in your URL can be contained anywhere within in – they do not have to be at the end. The main consideration is that they do not resemble years.
The automated crawler that Google currently utilises can crawl regular HTML links to great effect, but is unable to crawl image links or those embedded in JavaScript.
If you would like assistance getting your website or blog into Google News then please do contact us, we would be delighted to help.
Kerry McPhail