by Julie Bort

8 ways to get noticed on Google News

Analysis

Feb 12, 20093 mins

Figuring out how to get your site’s content high up on Google, both via the general search engine and other areas like Google News, has always been a puzzle. Google guards its algorithms tightly and at times, the reasons behind why one site gets noticed, while another gets ignored, are completely mystifying. In an effort to clarify things–and probably reduce the number of irate calls to its News staff–Google has published eight tips for improving your content listing in Google News.

The tips, while offering very little insight into Google’s secret algorithmic sauce, aim to help users avoid the most simple errors when it comes to getting Google News to successfully crawl a site. Posted by Abe Epton of the online news team, they include:

1. Keep the article body clean. In other words, don’t clutter up the article with tags, ads, sidebars and other non-related content.

2. Use unique permanent URLs. Don’t reuse URLs, and avoid using digits that resemble dates.

3. Use stock tickers. Including the tickers specified in Google News Sitemaps helps Google more easily identify article subjects.

4. Check the encoding. Articles that say they are encoded one way (say UTF-8) but are really encoded another (say ISO 8859-1) won’t get picked up. In fact, Epton says “It hurts us.”

5. Clarify the date. Place the article date and time in the HTML between the title and the body. Also, add the required tag to articles in your News Sitemap.

6. Separate news content from press releases. These should be on two different sections of the site, and if a news article points to a press release, it should include the requisite rel=”nofollow” attribute.

7. Format images properly. Use large images, distinctive captions and make them inline and non-clickable.

8. Be careful with titles. Make sure the same title appears in both the title tag and as the headline on the article page. Plus, don’t hyperlink it.

While the tips probably won’t rocket your content to the top of Google News, they promise to at least make it more likely that Google will crawl it properly. For more on getting noticed by Google, check out Jon Rognerud’s top “white hat” tips for optimizing your site.

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