Google Gives Five Helpful Insights On How To Appear In Google News

The right SEO content creation strategy can get articles featured in Google News. Google recently gave SEO content publishers five helpful insights to better understand how to get news articles to appear in Google Search and Google News.

Google published a blog post with answers to the most commonly asked questions about news content. In this article, the search engine company explained the following:

• Where news appears on Google
• How news articles become eligible to appear on Google
• How to know if a website appears on Google News
• How SEOs can improve their content's visibility
• Why some news articles still do not appear despite following Google's advice

1. Places Where Google Displays News Content

News content can appear on Discover, YouTube, Google Assistant, Google Search, and Google News.

Users can access Google News on news.google.com or via the mobile app, and the platform can show news content in two ways.

Google News have the "For You" tab, where users can see a personalised feed of news stories based on their preferences. Meanwhile, the "Headlines" tab shows the same set of news content for all the people living in the same region.

Aside from displaying links to news articles in the search engine results pages, Google Search shows news content in the News tab and the Top Stories carousel.

2. Site Eligibility For Google News

In the past, Google required SEO content creators and publishers to undergo an application process to get their news articles to appear in Google News. It was a notoriously difficult process, but the search engine company decided to quietly change their policy in 2019.

Google News automatically indexes websites as long as they meet the following criteria:

• The site should have a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
• The site should have a consistent history of producing original news articles
• The site should comply with Google's News policies

Aside from complying with Google's E-A-T algorithm system, the search engine company also prioritises original news articles more than other comprehensive versions of the story. Originally-written news articles will most likely stay in a highly visible position for a longer period, allowing readers to view them while visiting other recent articles alongside them.

Moreover, complying with Google's News policies means not creating news articles that are dangerous, hateful, violent, or deceptive.

3. Determining If A Website Is Showing In Google News

Website owners and online businesses can double-check if their content appears in Google News by looking at the site's performance report in Search Console. To be more specific, they can check the Google News and the Google Search reports, which can be filtered to the News search type.

These reports help businesses and creators determine if the website receives traffic from news surfaces within Google Search and Google News.

However, the search engine company reminded SEOs that although they can use the "site:" search query on the News tab or Google News to distinguish indexed pages, it does not mean that these pages are eligible to appear for news searches.

4. Improving The Visibility Of News Articles

Once Google's algorithm system distinguishes that the content is eligible to display in news surfaces, it automatically determines the page's rankings using these factors:

• Prominence
• Relevance
• Freshness
• Authoritativeness
• Language
• Location

SEOs can also use Google's Publisher Center to manage the content that they think would be eligible. However, the search engine determines eligibility through the automated process. Therefore, site owners and content creators are limited in what they can do with Publisher Center. For instance, one cannot use this interface to force their news content into Google News.

5. Why Websites Do Not Appear In Google News

Google emphasises the importance of consistently producing original news content with high authoritativeness and expertise. Following this advice is the very first step that a publisher should take to ensure that their website becomes eligible to appear on Google's news surfaces.

In the end, Google reminds the SEO community that its systems run regularly and will recognise if a website improves its content to meet the search engine's criteria.

Google Top Stories

Aside from Google News, the SEO community can also use Google's Top carousel to gain more organic traffic. SEO publishers can treat their Top Stories just like any other kind of article, linking to them from a prominent page, like the site's homepage. Moreover, they should include the content in a dedicated sitemap before moving it into a regular article archive sitemap, depending on the setup.

In the past, the Top Stories carousel only accepted AMP articles on mobile devices. But now that Google has updated their Core Web Vitals this year, any type of non-AMP article can now show in the Top Stories carousel.

Nevertheless, if the SEOs who continue publishing AMP-based content outnumber the non-AMP users, it could pose a huge challenge for the latter. This is because AMP articles load much faster than other types of content.

The Importance Of Creating News Content For Google

Many niche websites create news content and make every effort to publish them on Google News and Google's Top Stories because it could help them attract avid news readers and reach new audiences.

With Google News, readers can:

• Read content offline
• Subscribe to various news providers and topics
• Personalise their "For You" section
• Bookmark and share articles

Being featured in Google's Top Stories can also reward a website with increased traffic because it will be prominently displayed at the top of the page in Google News.

Overall, creating engaging news content and getting it featured in Google News can do a lot for one's SEO, as this helps immensely in boosting a site's traffic and search visibility.

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