Google News Search – How To Rank Well?

Google News is one of the most valuable resources for online news seekers. And Google is making more efforts to make it more useful to its audiences. One of the recent tweaks in the news section has been the incorporation of real-time search suggestions into news queries. When users are typing in a query in the search box, Google offers several suggestions pertaining to the entry.

This offers tremendous opportunities for web publishers to optimize their content and attract more traffic to their content. With effective search engine optimization practices, you can use news search to gain more traffic.

How do articles appear in Google News?

News articles can appear in Google search results in two ways - As a news link on top of the regular search on Google.com and then in the results for Google News homepage.

Google gathers articles from across the web in a 3 step process – Indexing >> Grouping >> Ranking.

Crawling

This is more like the regular web search, where Google bots that go to your news sites and look for new information and then Google retrieves these articles in 2 ways -

Discovery crawl
Google sees new URLs and then crawls those articles. This is akin to the regular crawling procedure.

News Sitemaps
You can create News Sitemaps on your website and list exactly what are your new URLs. This way Google bots can browse through the sitemap and go directly to the new links. Google can use these sitemaps in addition to the Discovery crawl to find new information on your website..

Google also respects the robot exclusion protocol. So, you can create a robot.txt file or use HTTP headers to let Google know specifically what documents you want to be included in Google search results and what you want to be excluded.

Once all the articles are crawled effectively, they are brought back to Google to mark an end of the crawling process.

Grouping

The Grouping phase is based on the classification idea. Google considers the content matter of each individual article and take out individual words (keywords) and understand what category does the article pertain to. This is how different sections in Google News like Business, Health, Entertainment etc. are populated.

Google also populates the editions for various countries like UK, USA, India etc. This information is also taken from the content of the article by considering words that pertain to geographical locations.

Ranking

The Ranking process comes in two phases – Story ranking and Individual Article Ranking

Story Ranking
This is what you see in the Google News homepage where there are typically a group of news stories placed orderly. Now, the order of these stories is what story ranking is all about. The ranking of these stories (i.e. what comes first and second and third) is determined by what is called aggregate editorial interest. This is the measure of the effect the article has on publishing activity on the web and how much editorial interest it generates.

Individual Article Ranking
This is how Google takes a cluster of news stories about a particular topic and determines the order of ranking for all of them. This is based on a majority of factors. The major ones are:

Freshness
The article should contain recent, substantial and unique information about the news topic. That is why press releases and editorials don't make it to the top spot.

Duplication & Novelty Detection
Google places increased credibility to the original source of news information than the news articles that are simple citing the original and duplicating the contents.

Local & Personal Relevancy
This applies to individual sections as well as editions of your publication. Google places increased weightage to local sources that are more relevant to the news item.

Trusted Sources
This is actually data-driven. If more number of users go to a particular link from among a cluster of articles covering the same topic, then that is considered to the most trusted source for the users.

Kabir Bedi is a senior web consultant at LeXolution IT Services, a professional web design company that has a team of skilled Web designers & developers, India. The company offers a plethora of web services including website designing & development services.