How To Rank in Google News
If you personally want to rank in Google news you could simply be a potty mouth on ABC live TV during Children’s viewing times. That’s what our Communications Minister, Senator Stephen “I’ll protect you’re children online… help I’m locked out of my iPhone” Conroy did yesterday. It was interesting to watch what Google chose to rank as breaking news in Australia during that 1 – 2 hour period. All of the stories were about our vocabulary-challenged Communications Minister.
When I was looking at the breaking News there were 26 stories covering the Senator’s speech but not all of them were focusing on the inappropriate use of one of the English language’s most versatile words. Some outlets like Delimiter.com.au & Gizmodo.com.au were actually reporting on the content of his speech. Within minutes, the outlets that were covering the launch of the F-bomb pushed out the likes of Delimiter even though they were covering the same event. The Google algorithm had decided that Conroy’s content wasn’t news, his faux pas was.
Realtime backlinks, authority & general news
Google can only calculate what is news by the use of what is trending and it does that by looking at realtime backlinks and the authority certain sites have built up over time. To get ranked in news when someone does a keyword search there are three things you need.
- Approval from Google – they actually need to approve your site for news. You need to show a reliable track record of producing news related content.
- A Google news sitemap – Setup in Webmaster tools, it similar to a standard one but has specific news parameters.
- Get the date in the URL – Google actually told us that is why one of our clients wasn’t ranking in Google News. An example of this would be the Delimiter story http://delimiter.com.au/2011/12/13/technical-dead-end-conroy-smashes-turnbulls-nbn-policy/ . Our client site had been approved for Google News but did not rank until we changed that one parameter.
You don’t have to be a big news outlet to get ranked in Google news, Google just has to deem you worthy and make sure you follow standard SEO practices for your content.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
