Understanding the Process of Submitting Your WordPress Site to Google News
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Let’s figure out why getting into Google News is a good idea in the first place.
Google News is an attempt, like other news aggregators, to pick through news from across the world and deliver up-to-date news content to the readers in a clutter-free, sensible and practical way. Translated, it means spikes in your WordPress website traffic, and a huge visibility and credibility boost for your blog or website.
What It Takes to Be a Part of Google News
Google, the Search Engine, and Google News work in different ways. Google dispatches what are known as web ‘crawlers’ to look through the internet for changes, and it then records those updates in an index. While Google News has its crawlers too, they only look through and index pages and blogs that are on a pre-approved list, thus making the scanning process faster and more relevant to news enthusiasts.
However, this also means that you need to submit your WordPress site to Google News so they can approve it at all. And like you might have guessed by now, Google uses strict and fair criteria before they accept or reject a submission.
Some of these criteria are fairly obvious, such as the fact the content you create must be both gripping and timely. Regardless of what audience you choose, the news you deliver must be relevant to them. Other requirements include:
- Your content quality, its design, the loading speed of the website – most of which can be ensured because you’re using WordPress, and as we’ve always said, a befittingly professional theme – should all meet the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
- Once that hurdle is cleared, you’ll need to meet the Google News Guidelines. These will check further for the quality of writing, technical standards, how readable the news is, how verifiable and authentic your news is, and thus your credibility.
- Now you’re ready to submit your WordPress site, through what is known as a Google News Sitemap. Now don’t you worry, there are plugins to help – Indeed, what would we do without them?
Just a few more pointers for you before you leap:
Check the structure of your website URLs
Ensure that you have unique URLs. Using common headlines that are used by, or likely to be used by, news blogs and websites in your space will keep your news from standing out. It’s always better to create distinct and informative headlines that will keep your content fresh.
A longer headline is perfectly alright, but if you must keep the URL short then have at least three digits. Another key idea to live by is to keep your URLs permanent.
Check redirects on earlier posts.
Google News crawlers will pick up earlier news posts, but if you add redirects to a new website, you’ll need to check if all your 301 redirects are doing their jobs. Also, check for any crawl errors frequently and fix issues at the earliest. 404 errors shouldn’t be allowed to crop up.
Plugins That Can Help With the Google News Sitemap
The Google News Sitemap is just an XML sitemap that lets Google know what the contents of your website are. It also lets Google know when you make updates to your website.
This is where the plugins that we spoke of before come in. There are quite a few good ones that can auto-generate a sitemap as well as keep search engines posted on updates to them:
XML Sitemap & Google News Feeds
This plugin is free and it does what it’s supposed to. After installing it, go to its settings, activate the ‘Google News Sitemap’, and you’re good to go. You can optionally customize what should be included in the sitemap, but the plugin works for the basic purpose right out of the box, and it supports multi-sites as well.
Yoast’s News SEO
This isn’t a plugin in itself, rather a paid ($69) upgrade to the plugin called Yoast WordPress SEO. Short of submitting your posts to Google News, it can manage most news-related functions – including generating the XML sitemap you need, the RSS feeds for editor’s picks, letting you employ tags and stock tickers and keywords for news, setting genres and many more.
It even lets you exclude categories if that’s what you need to be done.
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