Consider this image below from the SEOmoz Google Analytics account. Behold a sight rarely displayed in SEO blogs.
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Notice the similarities to a typical Kansas highway. 
Both are dead flat, contain no peaks or valleys, and are traffic free.
Such was the sad state of SEOmoz’s referral traffic from Google News prior to April of this year. In truth, SEOmoz didn't really pursue traffic from Google News for several reasons.
- Google News never sent us significant traffic in the past
- In our minds, we don't consider ourselves a "news" organization
- Unlike news organizations, SEOmoz doesn't drive revenue through advertising
What Changed Our Minds?
In April, Rand’s post on White Hat SEO went nuclear. The blogosphere exploded with commentary and traffic poured in from all corners of the Internet. We recorded 8000 visits from Google News the first two days alone.
The drought was over.
But why that particular post? Rob Ousbey from Distilled pointed out that the few SEOmoz posts included in Google's News index all had one thing in common. They each contained a number in the URL. For example:
../blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421
../blog/google-told-you-so-12428
../ugc/dissecting-local-seo-via-competitive-analysis-12284
Given the way Google News indexes content, this makes sense:
“Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits… Please note that this rule is waived with News sitemaps.”
- From Google (publishers) Help
Our indexation was pure accident! By default, most SEOmoz blog URLs don't contain numbers.
We decided to dispose of our previous perceptions and chart a proactive course in gaining visits from Google News. Here's how we did it - and how you can too.
1. Are You Newsworthy? Yes You Are
You no longer have to be a big news player (or a spammer) to find your way in Google News. Google clearly states both blogs and news organizations alike qualify for inclusion.
Ask yourself the following questions. Consider yourself a candidate if you meet the following criteria.
- Do you discuss current events?
- Is your content timely?
- Do you offer commentary?
- Is your blog itself newsworthy?
These are some of the same qualifications that make for great content in any context. The number of categories in Google News is staggering. It includes topics as varied as business, education, humor and even ice hockey.
There's room for everything in Google News. Love to write about hair? Yep, there's news for that.
Don't sell yourself short. If you’re not already producing newsworthy content, you should.
2. Qualify Your Site
Not everyone gets in Google News automatically. To see if you're already included in the index, perform a “site:” command within Google News using your domain. In our case, SEOmoz was already included.
If Google hasn’t included your site in its news index, you can request inclusion.
Rand addressed how to improve your chances of appearing in Google News in a recent PRO Webinar. He recommended improving your site's substantive metrics, including such factors as the number of inbound links and subscribers to your blog. Having a good user interface can also help.
Again, even if getting in Google News isn't your focus, these are the same benchmarks for increasing your visibility on the Web in any market.
3. Get Your Content Indexed
Google keeps its news index separate from its regular web index. Just because Google crawls your site and you appear in search results, doesn't mean your content is included in Google news.
There are two ways to get your content included in the index:
1. Number your URLs (see above)
or
2. Create a Google News Sitemap.
The sitemap contains a number of advantages over simply numbering your URLs. Sitemaps allow you to tag your article with proper titles and publication dates. In addition to categorizing your content more accurately, sitemaps also give you the ability to annotate your content with metadata such as keywords or stock tickers.
The downside is news sitemaps can be complicated to build if you lack development skills. Google dictates that your news sitemap should only contain articles published in the last 24 hours. So you'll want an automated system. In our case, Casey Henry was able to build a custom sitemap generator that met these specifications.
If you run a blog using a third party platform, a number of good solutions exist for Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and more.
4. Rise to the Top
A number of great articles have been written about how Google News works and how to get indexed. Indexation relies on several factors:
- Topic Factors – How hot is the story topic? Last week it was The Governator, but it could be anything, even kittens.
- Story Factors – How relevant and fresh is your specific content to this topic.
- Publication Reputation – Sort of like Domain Authority, except specific to news publication.
Timing is key to Google news. Paraphrasing from Rand's aforementioned webinar: "If you break a big story first, you can see more traffic than you ever imagined from the first page of Google News."
But timing a great story is hard to predict.
What you can control are a number of on-page factors that improve your chances. For example, adding a good photo next to your headline increases the likelihood of Google displaying the photo, which also helps your CTR. Adding a unique video to your post (along with maintaining an active video sitemap) also improves your chances of rising to the top.
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Other best practices to consider include titles, article text, and more. This great interview with Josh Cohen highlights many of these techniques.
5. What About the Results?
After we added a sitemap, Google News became the 4th largest referring traffic source for SEOmoz, bigger than Linkedin, StumbleUpon and Hacker News (but significantly behind Twitter, Facebook, and Google Image search.)
In the last month, three different posts received over 1000 extra visits. Our future posts are "primed" for more. To be fair, this isn't a huge amount of traffic for a site like SEOmoz. The traffic has a high bounce rate and low conversion rate.
That said, SEOmoz has not changed its content one iota to gain more traffic from Google News. We don't "chase the algorithm." Were we to optimize our content towards this goal, our traffic would undoubtedly rise higher.
Got a success story or more tips? Please share in the comments below.
It's certainly helped a lot but it's also a great way to get a handful of those free links as journalists and other bloggers look to reference, paraphrase or scrap your articles. Just wondering if you are watching how many more bots are scrapping your blog posts now that you are featured in Google news?
The only downside to it all is that Google news is like crack it's often hard to get that big hit constantly and end up chasing news and focusing on so call "breaking" news articles that are often rushed out with as much fact checking or research as you would have done in the past.
The only caveat around all this good news is the issue of Google defining you as a blog... even if you break or make the news...
it took me 2 months of negotiation after fulfilling the editorial and technical criteria to gain inclusion and that was with over 18 months of daily articles backing up the application. Pay attention to siteload speed of your news section, you'll note a certain threshold of those pages that are included. By keeping a spreadsheet sitemap of the articles and their outbound link destinations per article I eventually convinced the Google News team to accept it. Be prepared to contest with evidence their standard rejections but don't resubmit relentelessly without fixing the problems identified. One of the biggest reasons for rejection is ill advised self linking and lack of multi authored content without biographies of writers. it's cliche but be original , generous and useful to readers of your content/your market and you will improve chances of inclusion.
I just wanted to add to what Paul said and although I hope not to come across as the party pooper I did just want to point out that depending on the type of site, the amount of newsworthy content, how long they've been around, how unique their content is, how often they're truly breaking stories (not just about their brand) and so on can make this a very difficult task for some brands and it can be a bit of a nightmare to get included.
I'm certainly not trying to say it's not worth the effort as it can send some great traffic through, but for some folks it's going to be a big ask, and word on the street is Google is looking to be even more selective with who they let into news but also who they permit to stay.
Definitely worth going for it if you fit all of the qualifying criteria mentioned by Casey but be aware this can be a pretty tall order for some so be prepared to be patient and invest a fair bit of time in this if your site isn't pre-qualified and ready to go. Also, as Paul alludes to, you'd better be prepared to put your best negotiation suit on as well and hope that someone from the News team responds to you.
Hi Cyrus,
thanks for this useful guide... from what you said - the incidental numbers after the post url - probably made also my last YOUmoz jump into Google News: ironic, being about Google itself :).
Apart that (and more seriously), I believe that when it comes to Google News we have to think about how it is organized the News industry in the offline world. Surely our blogs (or clients' blogs) cannot compete against newspapers and magazines' website, as they own an higher Trust.
But as does exist general press, so exists the specialized one. That means that if you have a niche blog or niche news site you can really take advantage of Google News and, like it was a loop, that can increase you reputation, that increases your standing toward Google news and so on...
P.S.: I was forgetting... consider Google news as a brick in your Inbound Marketing strategy... remember the "News/PR" square in the Rand Inbound graphic: that is.
Is Casey Henry's sitemap generator available anywhere ?
Unfortuneatly, he custom built it to work specifically with our system. The good news is there are a number of good third party solutions out there.
Always appreciated. I look forward to seeing you in Seattle this summer!
Great insight Cyrus!
In my personal opinion traffic from Google news (even if you get on the 1st page with an image) is not the news where you can jump on the floor and say yapiee as you yourself said the website have high bounce rate and low conversion rate.
If you ask me I will put the strategy to add blog or news website on Google news in a 2nd phase I think there are other important ways where we should work (other than organic search) like Facebook and Twitter where you get the traffic that have a considerably better conversion rate.
I think you have made a good point Moosahemani, there is a danger that some will read this post and get hung up about getting a site in Google News in a similar way to the way some people seem to get hung up about getting citations listed in their Google Places account.
Having said this, the initial bullet point in the orginal article does state "If you are not producing newsworthy content you should be". If you want to become a thought leader in your industry, you need to produce quality content. This will give you an edge over your competitors - both in search and beyond.
I worked with a few clients that wanted to gain acceesss to Google news and get that traffic and links from journalists, well, it's not that easy and it's not such an easy process. I guess the crucial component here was the number of your subscribers, as with everything else the site we were working on matched and overmatched SEOmoz, yet it took quite the work and time to get it included into Google news.
But one thing is for sure, Google news can drive vast amounts of traffic, so it is a worthy goal to pursue.
Excellent, now all I need is 10 full time writers to even begin qualifying for Google news. This makes as much sense as writing why it's so much fun hvaing heaps of money.
oh and any plans to update Post Analytics to show Google news traffic... or if not it could be classified as referral or search traffic depending on where the Google news results were shown...
It's something we are considering for Phase 2 of Open Analytics.
Good tips for getting included in Google News. If I remember correctly, your URL can only be in Google News once. So if you update the article quite a bit, it's not a bad idea to change the URL, and 301 the old to the new to get reincluded at the top of Google News once more. Inbound links from external sites to the exact URL are not as important in Google News as it is in the regular search results since it's happening on such a quick timeline.
Great article, and thank you for being the other person I know who professes to receive "accidental SEO" or rankings. Sometimes a post or a client page goes nuclear as you put it, but for a completely different term than we expected It's usually a function of that pesky anchor text or a mid to high level manager in a large company sending around the link and having that link then embedded in a tradeshow booth demo (yep, it happened). I want to call that Exhibitor Bait. :)
My big question though relates to our experience with these accidental events. The traffic is horrible and rarely strays to a second page. We put various enticements and contests in sometimes to learn more about the people, but they are literally of a StumbleUpon quality. One visit for a few seconds and then bounce bounce bounce.
What did you see from visitor quality? Did subscriptions go up? Or did you see penetration into other verticals beyond marketing/advertising?
As others have noted, qualifying for News is hard work and shouldn't be done just to have it done. I'm sure there's a great strategy behind Moz's work there, but what about other unorthodox "news" organizations? Based on your experience, what can they expect?
Good point. I think "accidental SEO" can be either really useful or really useless depending on how it all comes out. I think the point is to simply maximize your potential for as much of it as possible, and if you get some useless accidental SEO then maybe just ignore it if you can't capitalize on it, but if you get some awesome accidental SEO than make the most of it. This Google News accident doesn't seem all that useful, perhaps, but for example: I daily monitor my keyword referrals. Sometimes I accidentally will get a hit due to a chance choice of words I used in some text about a topic that is only slightly related to what the user was obviously searching for. However, if appropriate, I will either edit that page or create a new page that focuses more closely on providing what that user was searching for, and I have sometimes seen that I start to get many more hits for that keyword or similar keywords.
The main thing I take from this post is not about the specific technicalities of Google News but about the general principle that if you pursue good content and SEO principles then you open yourself up to bonus activity that you were not even pursuing.
Thanks for the article. This is something we have definitely considered - who doesn't want a bigger audience for their content? It's challenging though for a number of reasons, esp. getting content out at a sufficient rate. Another challenge was not knowing how to get included in Google News! This is one of the first articles I've seen that really addresses the subject. So thanks Cyrus...I'm sure we'll be referring to this in the future.
In my opinion it is extremely difficult to gain ground in Google News. If I take a look at the website of Google News and link trough all the different themes (from Top Stories to Health....) the sources of the articles are only newspapers - everywhere ....
I will try your "guide" but without being such a brand as SEOmoz I think it is almost impossible to enter the game and being newsworthy.
This is true. SEOmoz is big brand & web pages of SEOmoz are highly engage on internet. But, we have to start to make brand like SEOmoz. What you think about it? Every small small efforts will make our path strong to be a big brand like SEOmoz.
If we are in different category & competitors are not like SEOmoz so our war will finish quite soon.
The big news players do have an advantage because of their authority and the sheer amount of original content they produce. I'm actually happy traditional news has a place. That said, the advantages of G news include:
Well it is harde rnot being a big brand. But it's really not that hard to be accepted. And once in, you might not get a a steady amount of traffic from Google News - but less can do. One or two spikes a month is great for content you produce anyway
With out News sitemap tags my website will not listed in Google news, if i add my website here, "https://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=191208&rd=1" than stiill this sitemap is essential or optional. please correct me?
Once you get accepted you either have to have numbers in your URL or use the Google News Sitemap. You have to do one or the other to get your posts into Google News.
Solid Overview of How to Get Exposure in Google News, Cyrus. Information like this:
"After we added a sitemap, Google News became the 4th largest referring traffic source for SEOmoz, bigger than Linkedin, StumbleUpon and Hacker News (but significantly behind Twitter, Facebook, and Google Image search.)"
Really helps put it into perspective. But, of course, it would also depend on how much effort is put into maximizing each referral source.
I know this post is a couple weeks old now, but I FINALLY came around to 'doing it'. THANKS Cyrus! I have installed the google-news-sitemap.xml to my new wordpress blog and subitted it to Google Webmasters. All I have to do is continue to write original content that is newsworthy and maybe one will make it into Google News (with a backlink). See you at MozCon.
Francisco
Google News is a great beast if you can gain ground in it, I agree with Davids point about following the trends if they are related to your niche. But also you must remember bigger sites seem to have far higher authority get all the top listings from what I have seen. One of my sites gained entrance in a similar way to SEOmoz where we had a great piece of content go viral and gain alot of interest and it was also something at the time 1000s of users were looking for.
A related Wordpress thing I never hear anyone talk/write about is
"For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields."
https://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Structure_Tags
I start permalinks with the post ID. This way the Google News Search friendly number is generated automatically. You may have to append a couple zeros to the ID to make it four digits.
...if your Wordpress site is news search worthy.
'Behold a site'... very clever.
I manage websites which are large players in the UK media space (within their specific niches at least), as such we often break stories which the mainstream UK media will pick up on. The Google News Sitemap is brilliant but one word of warning you must EXACTLY match the publication name which Google knows you by. All capitalisation for example must match the format Google knows you by when you do a "site:" command within Google News otherwise the XML sitemap is not going to work.
Also important to consider syndicating your news to other sources to obtain links back to your site. And...don't forget about the Google News rel=canon syndication:)
Excellent well written and precisly detailed article, however as a few have said, it smacks a bit of false hope and ultimately a waste of time and effort for most blogs. That is not to say it is untrue in any sense, it just will not be of value for most sites to pursue this end, unless they "happen" to break the "biggie" or are in a niche with low Brand competitors and in that case will there be useful traffic? I tend to value realism over the hopefullness.
Cyrus - May I know why Google removed to moz.com from Google news search?
I recently purchased a Google News site that had a penalty if you can believe that (was told it was clean before I bought it) they were using RSS copy paste tactics (thin/copied content penalty). They had like 60k posts... What I did was wipe out the entire site and started from scratch as it had some really good linking in the same niche I specialize in and was already in the 60's DA PA. After about a month and utilizing my 6 awesome writers going full bore and making phone calls for interviews providing good related unique content we got the penalty removed, the site now is indexed again and showing everywhere including Google news. The great thing about Google News that I can see first hand is in under 2 weeks we have had 3 posts go semi viral picked up by big brand media linking to us as a verified quality source (we have several good contacts in Hollywood for unique celeb content). Sites like TMZ, HuffPost, Inquisitr, Rolling Stone etc.seem much more incline to link to you with that lovely trust link than they would just a normal blog. The down side is traffic does go away quickly after the story starts to fade a bit. So you get a good blast for a day or 2 then back down to blah. The other problem I see with Google News is that they love the sites that are very high in authority with tons of writers turning out 20+ posts a day... so even if your post is the first to break a story you will be quickly (within minutes) be knocked out by the higher authority sites and soon you show no where for the post you broke in the first place. So, basicly the same ol same 'Big Dogs' still own the SERPS/TRAFFIC
I am going to uses this pronto!
Hello,
May I ask how you set up Google Analytics to track Google Images inbound visits? I currently track most referals from Socail Media sites, yet have not been able to crack how to find out what keywords from google images are bring traffic also.
Hi Gem. You can see searches from Google image search by looking at referring traffic sources. I believe you want to look for google.com/images. Then hit "keyword" as the secondary metric. You can also set up an advanced segment to see only visits from Google image search. Set your advanced segment for "source contains google.com/images." You probably want to double check because I'm going off the top of my head.
I am little bit confuse with URL number. I am working on service base website & going to start internal blog. My blog platform will be wordpress. My topic will be PHP, Photoshop and Google.
I am also looking forward with Google news sitemap. Is there any specific method to define URL structure?
I use 5 unique numbers for every article but don't use a Google news sitemap, everything you need is under the News publisher help
Yup!! My question is on same direction. Right now, my web page URLs are available without number. So, Can I add it or re-write my URL?
You don't need the number in your URL as long as you provide an XML sitemap in the News format.
Once you are accepted in Google News you can either use numbers in the URL or create a Google News Sitemap. The sitemap is a much easier solution than adding numbers to the end of your urls for every post. My suggestion is that if you get accepted, use a sitemap and forget the numbers at the end of your url.
In Wordpress, look at the Permalink structure (on the left pane) and update the settings.
That's fine if you're starting from scratch but updating your permalink structure will update the URLs of all your posts (not pages) across your wordpress site - not good!
Go with the news sitemap plugin - https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-news-sitemap-generator/ as referenced in the post.
There is another WordPress plugin that handles both the XML Sitemap and Google New Sitemap that you might be interested in:
This plugin dynamically creates feeds that comply with the XML Sitemap and the Google News Sitemap protocol. It is Multi-Site and Multi-Lingual compatible and there are no options to be set nor file or dir access rights to be tampered with.
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/
In Wordpress, you can use the Permalink settings.
Since Google News requires a unique number, I use the following permalink structure in my site: /%postname%-%minute%%second%/ this will give you something like this: yoursite.com/hello-world-2840/
This ensures that you still have pretty URL's, but add a number at the end. The reason I use Minute and Second is that the likelyhood that you publish your posts at exactly the same minute and secons is pretty minimal, ensuring that the number is unique. Using Month and Day could also work, but only if you plan not to blog more than once a day.
Hope this helps
Tom
I don't think Google even need the numbers to be unique so this solution would work even if you posted at the same minute / second.
Thanks for the step by step. Why not give it a shot, Nothing ventured nothing gained.
Dear Cyrus Shepard,
Your story is similar with me.My own past experience tells the same thing.Content play a very vital role in SEO.Once my client asked me why my company news are not visible in google news.I did lots of research on Google news and found that only content could save me.I prepared some fine optimized articles,press releases and PDF documents and posted on various articles,press releases websites,content shareing websites.I found docstoc.com is very good resource for increasing views of your documents and ultimately resulting into increased traffic for your website.Then what a surprize? My content(published PRs,documents,articles) used to appeare in Google news.Even my client appriciated it as he was getting Google alerts about his company news and events.
Thanks for sharing your post.
I'm mildly shocked you guys didn't do this earlier. Goog news is a huge desitination. I like that they make blogers jump through some hoops so total noobs to web publishing don't get agregated.