About Google News

1. Rules for inclusion

2. Keep it fresh

3. Subject history

4. Avoid duplicate content

5. Be transparent

1. Rules for inclusion

2. Keep it fresh

Google puts emphasis on current information within certain searches and specifically within Google News

• Often Google News results and news boxes in search results will display sites by publish date with the newest content ranking 1^st

• This isn’t always the case, as relevancy and authority play a major part, but publish date can have a large impact especially when a story is breaking

• Google News requires clearly showing both the date and the time that content was published or updated

• Date and time should be positioned between the headline and the article text

• If Google has trouble finding an article's date or determines the publication date of an article is older than 2 days, it may not be included it in Google News

Avoid artificially freshening stories

• If an article has been substantially changed, you can update the date and time

• Don't artificially freshen a story without adding significant information or some other compelling reason for the freshening

• Don't create a slightly updated story from one previously published, then delete the old story and redirect to the new one

• For your publication to be included in Google News, the article URL must meet the following criteria:

  • Be unique

  • Be permanent

  • Do not re-publish previously published articles under a new URL

Source: Google News Publisher Center

3. Subject history

Google will always favour websites that it has already assessed to be relevant and a potential authority on a given subject

• Warm up a story by writing about the subject prior to it

• The upcoming subject can be a supporting topic in content created around other topic

• When creating current content, consider future topics that might not exist yet, that would benefit from being warmed up

4. Avoid duplicate content

In order to avoid duplicate content and keep your content original, follow these guidelines:

• Do not scrape content: scraping commonly refers to taking material from another site, often on an automated basis.

• Do not re-write existing content: rewriting refers to taking material from another site and rewriting so that the content is not identical.

• If Google News encounters numerous versions of the same article, it may have trouble identifying which article is the original and which is a duplicate

  • If you publish the same article on multiple pages within your site, or within your network of sites, you may want to use the rel="canonical" tag to point to the original

  • This will help Google better identify the original content and credit it appropriately

Source: Google News Publisher Center

5. Be transparent

• Visitors want to trust and understand who publishes content

• Ensure content has clear bylines, information about authors, and contact information

• Google does not allow sites or accounts that impersonate any person or organization, or that misrepresent or conceal their ownership or primary purpose

• Google does not allow sites or accounts that mislead users, including but not limited to, sites or accounts that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or that direct content at users in another country under false premises

• Google does not allow content that infringes anyone’s intellectual property rights and will respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement

Source: Google News Producer