Google News is a popular service that is growing rapidly as it has more content and a wider audience every day. People want to get into the program as it means a lot more traffic and a lot more profit yet this is easier said than done. So how to get into Google News? Well, the simplest answer is to apply for the program, but if only it were that easy!

Chances are your website will be rejected very quickly when you first apply, but do not let this discourage you as you can apply again after some time. In this two-part article series we will teach you about all the requirements you need to fulfill, and be advised from the start that there are a lot of them!

How to get into Google News check list

Here is the general overview of all the conditions you should meet before you apply. Note that this is just a list you can return to at any given time and that will explain all the items in the list in great detail.

 How to get into Google News list:

• Your website has been online for quite some time.
• Your website is strictly news orientated and is not used for the promotion of any products or services other than that fact you have Google AdSense and paid banners from clients.
• The site looks well designed and is professional.
• Your site has several writers and their biographies and contact information should be  listed on some page of your site that you will have to supply. For example, www.mynewssite.com/writers is a great URL to provide some information on your writers.
• The URLs of articles have to be scanable, this means they should be permanent and not change over time. They should also have a unique number in the URL that consists of at least 3 digits.
• When it comes to content you should have a lot of it, and it has to be high quality. Of course it should also be updated quite frequently.
• There should be no copied content on your website. If you also have a part of your website that posts automatic news that are generated by a robot or script, and a part of the site that has unique original content, you can still apply, but the part of the unoriginal content of your website should not be included into the Google news.

Advantages of joining Google News

It doesn’t take much time to figure it out but here a solid list anyway:

• More traffic, thus more chance of profit.
• It will give you some high quality backlinks in no time.
• You will become a relative authority, which means your site will have more weight on search engines.
• Your content will be shared more often and quoted by other authors who use it for their own website which again means more traffic and backlinks.
• Rapid and quick indexing.

Technical requirements to join Google News

So in the begging we asked the question how to join Google News and we provided some answers, but now we want to go into the matter with more detail. The best place to start is the technical requirements.

All article urls for google news must be unique

This means that all your articles must have a URL that meets certain criteria. First of all, each article must have its own URL. This easy to explain via WordPress as an example. There can be several articles on www.domain.com/tag/sports which is not a unique URL. A unique URL would be www.domain.com/news/dark-mater-found-in-space which clearly shows that it is a specific and unique article. But this URL is still not good enough for Google News. In order for the robots to crawl the article it should look something more like this: www.domain.com/news/dark-mater-found-in-space-123 and as you can see the only difference is the added numbers which represent a unique code that has to be at least three digits and not show up on other articles of your site. It is easy to edit permalink in WordPress and that’s why it is very popular among people who are aiming at getting into Google News.

Google can’t crawl java, pdf or flash

So keep in mind that all your content should be simple text in HTML and it will work best with Google’s robots. PDFs can not be crawled either. Stick to pure html if you want to be found by Google. Skip the fancy stuff.

Check your sitemap and crawls

Try to make sure that you didn’t make any settings that don’t allow robots.txt to crawl your website as this will be your downfall. If you get into Google News, you should also make a special sitemap which is not needed, but is highly recommended and is found here.

Continue to part 2