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Most people who use the internet for information on a daily basis know what Google News is. They check it for all kinds of news, whether it’s a big, global iPhone announcement or a small local event in their home town.

But how do you get your content to show up on Google News and why is it so important?

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What is Google News?

The best way to describe Google News is probably with this quote from Google itself:

“Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader’s personalised interests.”

The benefits of having your site appear in Google News

There are many benefits of having your site content appear in Google News. It means that even if your content doesn’t show up on the first page of Google, it could still show up on the first page of Google News for specific keywords which will bring traffic to your website.

Having your content appear on Google News is also a great way of raising your profile too and the more people who see your content the higher the likelihood you’ll get more incoming links to your website, which will help with general SEO too.

How to appear on Google News

In order to get your content on Google News you need to contact Google directly to start with and ask them to consider your site.

You can get in touch with them on the Suggest News page.

Although it’s important to remember that Google will not include all of the sites that send their URL.

Some key things that Google considers according to OJR are: original content, more than one author, proper attribution and quick server response time.

What’s a News Sitemap?

A Sitemap is basically a list of the pages on your website. It’s important to create a Sitemap so that Google knows about all the pages on your site including the URLs that Google might not normally discover when it’s looking for content.

So, a News Sitemap is the same thing, but it allows you to control which content you submit to Google News (after you’ve been officially accepted following the instructions above).

By making a News Sitemap you help Google to find what’s important on your website. This means the right content and news can be found faster, all news articles, even the old ones can be found, all the right information (like author and date) can be found accurately and all of the right metadata is found too (like keywords and stock tickers).

Making a News Sitemap is important, as it’ll mean the right information is found quickly. However, Google stresses that sites with a News Sitemap are not favoured over those that don’t have them.

Read Google’s official overview of News Sitemaps for more information.

A News Sitemap is often important if your site has dynamic content, if it’s new or if your readers need to click several links to get to the news.

If you think a News Sitemap is for you then ask your web team to build one for you and upload it to the highest level directory that contains your news articles.

Read Google’s official guide to creating a News Sitemap for more information.

[Image via Wikipedia]

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