Google News SEO Best Practices

Optimizing articles for Google News is somewhat similar to what you do to rank your non-news content. Google mainly focuses on the quality of your content and adherence to SEO Best Practices. But doing this is not enough for your news articles to rank high on Google's News Platforms.

You must pay attention to the subtle technical aspects when it comes to SEO for news articles. Let's start...

Where can News appear on Google?

• Google News
• Top Stories
• Google Discover
• Videos Section

Google News:

Google aggregates news from different sources and then uses its algorithms to determine which news story to show users based on interests, location, prominence, authoritativeness, freshness, and usability. 

Best Practices that can help rank on Google News:

Site Structure:

• Permanent Section Pages: URLs of the main news section should not change they must be permanent
• Accessible Content: News content should not be blocked by a robots.txt file and metatags or header specifications should not block access to the article links.
• Google News crawls with the same robot as Google Web Search, i.e. the Googlebot.

Google News Sitemap

• Include URLs for articles published in the last 2 days.
• Update your News sitemap with new articles as they're published.
• Add up to 1,000 full URLs to include more, break these URLs into multiple sitemaps, and use a sitemap index file to manage them. Use the XML format provided in the sitemap protocol. Do not list more than 50,000 sitemaps in your sitemap file.
• Update your current sitemap with your new article URLs. Do not create a new sitemap with each update.
• Do not use the Google Sitemap Generator to create a News sitemap. The generator includes URLs that don't correspond to specific news articles.

Language Requirements

• Google News doesn’t show sites with articles that display multiple languages in a single article.
• If the site has language-specific sections, like, example.com/french and example.com/english, then, create separate publications for each language. This ensures users are presented with content in their language.

URL Structure

• Unique URLs: Each page that displays an article's full text needs to have a unique URL. Google can’t include sites in Google News, that display multiple articles under one URL, or that don’t have links to pages dedicated solely to each article.
• Permanent URLs: To make sure our links to articles work, each article on the news site must be associated with a permanent URL. For example, Googlebot-News wouldn't be able to crawl the page www.yoursite.com/news1.html if it displays a different story every day.

URL Redirects         

When using redirects:      

• Minimize the number of redirects needed to follow a link from one page to another.
• Set your redirect timer for a relatively short period of time.
• Avoid using meta refreshes in the statement of your pages.
• Make sure that all of your redirects are valid and not empty.
• Do not use &ID= as a parameter in your URLs.
• To see how your site would be crawled, use a text browser with no cookies and navigate to your site.

Structured Data

Google utilizes the structured data in some of the following fields while showing your content in Google News:

• datepublished: The date and time the article was first published, in ISO 8601 format.
• datemodified: The date and time the article was most recently modified, in ISO 8601 format.
• headline: The headline of the article. Headlines should not exceed 110 characters.
• image: The URL to an image that goes with the article. Only a marked-up image that directly belongs to the article should be specified.
• isAccessibleForFree: Boolean flag to indicate free vs paywalled content.

Textual Optimization

• Technically, an article only needs to be 80 words to be considered for a news-article. However, it is advised to use a minimum of 125 words for headline-news, as well as a minimum of 250 words for every other type of news.
• With this recommendation of at least 125 and 250 words, it is important that none of these words are linked to both internally or externally. Additionally, you should write the 250 words for a news-articles in one piece, without splicing a social media plugin or advertising block in between the text.

To be blocked content

• Block scraped content
• Block Unnatural or Paid Links

Image Optimization

• Use images that are relevant to the story rather than logos or captions.
• Use Schema.org or og:image tags to make it clear to the image crawl which image you’d like to be the thumbnail image next to your article.
• Use standard filename extensions, like .jpg, .jpeg, or .png.
• Size your images to at least 60 x 90 pixels.
• Use images that have reasonable aspect ratios.
• Format your images as inline.
• Place your images near their respective article titles.
• Apply relevant alt tag to the image.

Page Loading Speed

• The ideal loading time for a website that wants to appear in Google News is 200ms, i.e. the optimal result would be if a news-article can be loaded and rendered in a reader’s web browser within 200 milliseconds.

Artificially Freshening Stories

• If an article has been substantially changed, it can make sense to give it a fresh date and time. However, don't artificially freshen a story without adding significant information or some other compelling reason for the freshening.
• Do not create a very slightly updated story from one previously published, then delete the old story and redirect to the new one, that's against Google’s article URLs guidelines.

Top Stories

Top Stories is a section that appears within Google Search when Google detects a search query that is news-oriented. Google matches the search with relevant, quality news content to display.

Top stories feature articles related to the search and a link to more related articles on the News tab. Content is automatically selected for this feature.

Best Practices that can help rank on Top Stories:

Enable AMP

• Comply with AMP logo guidelines : AMP fits in a 60x600px rectangle, and either be exactly 60px high (preferred), or exactly 600px wide. A logo 450x45px would not be acceptable, even though it fits within the 600x60px rectangle.

Use structured data to markup your articles

Use the following schema types to increase your chances of appearing in the Rich Results:

• Article
• NewsArticle
• BlogPosting
• LiveBlogPosting
• DiscussionForumPosting
• VideoObject

Use multiple large images in your markup

• Provide images that are at least 1.200 pixels wide and that have 800.000 pixels in total.
• For best results, publishers shall provide multiple high-resolution images with the following aspect ratios: 16×9, 4×3, and 1×1.

Google Discover

Google Discover mainly focuses on showing personalized content to the user based on their search history. In google discover you’ll find more videos and fresh visual content, as well as evergreen content—articles and videos that aren’t new to the web but are new to you.

Google’s new guidelines say to focus on these elements to get ranked on Google Discover.

• Page titles should capture the essence of the content but in a non-clickbait fashion.
• Avoiding tactics to artificially inflate engagement by using misleading or exaggerated details in preview content (title, snippets, images) to increase appeal, or by withholding crucial information required to understand what the content is about.
• Having content that’s timely for current interests, tells a story well, or provides unique insights.
• Provide clear dates, bylines, information about authors, the publication, the publisher, company or network behind it, and contact information to better build trust and transparency with visitors.
• Include high-quality images in your content, especially large images that are more likely to generate visits from Discover. Large images need to be at least 1200 px wide and enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting, or by using AMP. Avoid using a site logo as your image.

Videos 

YouTube video content for a news section

On the “Content” tab, you can choose to populate the section with YouTube videos from either a channel or a playlist to get those videos in the Google News Section

• Channel: Enter the name of the channel. For example, if the channel URL is https://www.youtube.com/user/googlechrome, enter googlechrome. Google News displays videos from the “Uploads” section of the channel under “Browse videos.” (Even if you've set the default tab of your channel to “Featured tab” or “Feed,” Google News shows the videos under “Uploads.” This means your new section may not show the same content as the front page of your YouTube channel.)
• Playlist: Enter the full URL of the playlist. For example, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL12.

Video Schema

• Video Schema is also the essential element of getting videos appeared in the rich video carousel
• Video Sitemap A video sitemap entry can describe a video the same way as a VideoObject structured data element.
• The advantage of using a video sitemap is that it also helps Google find new or updated videos, and that it can describe many videos in one file rather than requiring Google to crawl each page and discover changes individually.