How To Get Blog Posts Listed In Google News

Google News aims to organize all the world’s news and make it accessible to its users, while providing the best possible experience for those seeking useful and timely news information.

Yoast SEO has a little wordpress plugin for Google News that you can install for a fee. This can be a good tool if you are not very tech savvy and are looking for ways to improve SEO. It is easy to use, but if you are are a complete beginner and you are not sure how to use it, then you can always have a look at this yoast tutorial. However, you can also just learn the code and do it yourself if you have good knowledge of tech terminology and SEO.

• Read the Google news posting guidelines

News Technical Guidelines

Google News uses a computer algorithm to automatically crawl news sites. To help our system determine which webpages are actually articles, your site should follow our Technical Guidelines.

Here are some common technical issues you should consider:

• Article URLs. Please make sure your article URLs are unique and permanent.
• Article Links. When our crawler scans your site, it looks for HTML links with anchor texts that includes at least a few words. We are also unable to crawl JavaScript, graphic links or links found in frames.
• Article formatting. Our crawler is only able to include HTML articles. This means we cannot crawl PDFs or other non-HTML formats.
• Robots.txt or metatags. In order for your content to be included in Google News, our user-agent must be able to crawl and index your site.
• Multimedia content. We currently are unable to include audio files or multimedia content; however, we can sometimes crawl supplementary text on pages with this type of content and do include some videos from YouTube.

While not required, we highly recommend that you submit a Google News Sitemap through a Search Console account. Please note that you may receive errors if you submit your sitemap before your site has been reviewed and approved by our team.

Google Standout Tag

This tag helps identify what is important and will stand outGoogle also has a Blog Posting describing this tag.

See Standout Example From Yoast

If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results. The syntax for this new tag is as follows:

http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html” />

Meta news_keywords for Google News

Please note that this meta news_keywords tag is truly only for Google News, and thus not interesting if you’re not listed in Google News. Annoyingly the meta news_keywords are not the same as the keywords in the XML news sitemap, for which you can find the official documentation here. See more at Yoast