Table of Contents
- What is Google News and Why Does it Matter?
- Getting Your Site Ready For Approval
- Eligibility
- Getting Your Website Ready
- 1. Verify Site Ownership
- 2. Create News Sitemap
- 3. Add your Site to Google Publisher Content
- 4. Change Your Publication Settings
- 5. Configure Google News Settings
- 6. Review And Publish
- Conclusion
Do you need help to get your content seen by a wider audience on Google News in no time? For this, you need to get your website approved by Google Publisher Center. This may sound difficult; however, with the appropriate method, you can get your website approved without any hassle.
Apart from submitting your site to Google News, the secret to getting your site approved by Google Publisher Center is providing the correct information ensuring that it is genuine, accurate and up-to-date.
Check out this article to learn how to get your site on Google News and get tons of traffic, credibility, and authority on your blog.
What is Google News and Why Does it Matter?
Google News is a news aggregator service that is developed by Google. It uses the most updated algorithms that rank only the most authentic news by Publishers.
You will get many benefits from choosing Google News:
- It brings significant traffic and builds a solid base audience because of the trust factor.
- Moreover, it rewards high-quality content. The Publisher’s stories are ranked based on their readership, which means that if your content is interesting and helpful to people, then you will gain more traffic from Google News.
- Another catchy feature of Google News is that it rewards the publishers’ content based on readability and engagement. This feature is so important in today’s digital landscape because people are more likely to read content that’s easier to digest.
Getting Your Site Ready For Approval
Before submitting your site for approval, make sure it meets Google News policies and rules to avoid getting rejected.
For approval, ensure your website doesn’t contain content related to any of the given below categories.
- Dangerous
- Deceptive
- Hateful
- Sexually explicit
Eligibility
To make certain your site is ready and eligible for Google News, it’s important to meet the following content guidelines.
- The content should reflect transparency such that the viewers should be aware of the entity behind the published content, the time at which it was written and any other affiliate sponsorship that may be present.
- It should also be factually accurate, as well as free of any personal bias or agenda.
- Your pages shouldn’t have more advertisements or other paid promotional content than necessary.
- There should be no manipulative or threatening media in the content, and it should be written pleasantly and professionally.
In short, the more tailored the content is, the more exposure it will get on Google News.
If you want to know how to get your WordPress approved from Google News, the following 6 step guide will help you quickly get through the process of approval by the Google News Publisher centre.
Getting Your Website Ready
Creating a news sitemap is important for your content to appear on Google News tabs because it only includes news articles and gets them indexed much quicker than the original content publishing.
Plugins that we can use,
- Jetpack
- All in One SEO (AIOSEO)
- Google News sitemap
- Yoast News SEO
But for this tutorial, we will use the Jetpack plugin because most WordPress users already have it installed on their websites.
1. Verify Site Ownership
If you have already installed jetpack and signup, you have to enable the Sitemap option from settings. But first, ensure that Google Webmaster verifies your site, or we can verify site ownership through “Verify with Google” or “Manually Verify“.
- For “Manually Verify” you simply have to place the meta verification code given by Google Search Console.
- For “Verify with Google“, a popup window would appear to sync Google Search Console with WordPress jetpack, and it automatically places the meta verification code.
Let’s continue the site verification, Go to Jetpack Settings, Navigate to the Traffic tab and click on “Verify with Google”.
A popup window will appear asking you to Choose an account to continue with WordPress, select the account where you have set up a webmaster account.
After selecting your account, WordPress will require you to allow access to fetch some details to complete the verification process.
When you have allowed the permission, you will see a green text saying: “Your site is verified with Google”.
2. Create News Sitemap
Let’s enable the sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console. Under the sitemap section, you can allow the Sitemap XML by clicking on Generate XML sitemaps under the sitemap section.
It will generate two sitemaps, one for the overall structure of the web and the other for news-sitemap.xml would be specifically for articles we submit to Google News.
Now, let’s submit these sitemaps to Google Search Console. Navigate to Search Console from the sidebar and click on “Sitemaps” and there you would see an option to insert your new sitemap.
Simply place the news-sitemap.xml and click on Submit, and a popup would appear saying Sitemap submitted successfully.
And you’re done with the successful submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console.
Preparing Your Website For Submission Approval
Once you have created your news sitemap through the jetpack plugin and submitted it to Google Search Console for indexing, then move ahead with the second step by submitting our site to Google Publisher Center.
3. Add your Site to Google Publisher Content
To get started, navigate to the Google Publisher Center and login through your Google account, and you’ll get a welcome screen notification where you’re required to insert these values,
- Publication name (Place the name of your blog here)
- Primary website property (Use the URL for the main website that your publication is connected to)
- Location (Select the location of your publication’s headquarters. You can change this later in Publication settings)
After you have inserted the values required, click on Add publication. Now that you have submitted your publication successfully and it’s reflected on your Publisher Center dashboard.
4. Change Your Publication Settings
It’s time to get into more details by clicking on Publication settings.
You’ll find general information that you can change, such as Basic Information, Location, etc.
Scroll down and you’ll find the Primary website property URL, verify your website through Google Search Console.
Afterwards, there’s a section where you can add additional website property URLs and further down there are contacts where you can add information to get in touch.
Further, you have to click on Next after filling up the details. Next, you can add visuals that Google Publisher Center requires, such as the Square logo and Rectangular logo, and you even get custom font styling where you can add font family.
Once you’re done with these settings that were required you are done with the publication settings.
5. Configure Google News Settings
Now, it’s time to set up Google News publication for your website, from your Publisher Center dashboard, click on the Google News section.
You’ll be prompted to another page, where you can find more settings and sections you can edit.
Let’s discuss each of them.
The first thing you can change is the basic information, such as the category where you would define the publishing category that will help people to find your content in the relevant category.
Below, there’s another section named Distribution. Here you can specify countries from where your content would be accessible.
It is up to you and depending upon your website niche, you can allow certain countries to access your Google News page.
Moving on to the “Content settings” tab, you’ll have Sections and Access groups.
Now, you will have sections where you can specify the categories of our feed. Create tabs that fetch specific feeds from our website through RSS Feed URLs.
Let’s create our first feed by clicking on the “New section” button.
A drop down menu would appear where you further select if you want to fetch content through Feeds or Web location directly, and you even have an option for Video and your Personalised feed.
Let’s go ahead and click on Feed. A window will appear where you can add “Section title” and RSS feed URL and permission settings as well.
For the title, you have to enter the category name that you want to appear on Google News, such as News and below, you have to enter the RSS feed URL that we’re going to add ex, example.com/category_name/feed.
For RSS or Atom feed URLs, depending upon your permalink settings on WordPress, you have to append /feed at the end of your URL and click on Apply settings.
Congrats you have created your first section for Google News.
It is always recommended to test before publishing. You can use the “Access groups” option, where you would define certain permissions to specific users before making your Feed public.
And once, you’re finished, click Next.
6. Review And Publish
After configuring your Google News app and everything it includes, We’re at the final step of publishing.
On the “Review and publish” page, you’ll see some settings requiring review before publishing. So, you have to verify and fix the missing information that it suggests before hitting the Publish button.
After reviewing everything, the Publish button will be clickable. When you hit it, you’ll get a notification saying, “Thanks for submitting your application to Google News….”
It will require you to wait a few days to get approved, and you’re done.
Conclusion
In this article, we have explained all that is needed when it comes to submitting your website to Google News. Although you could simply wait for Google News to approve your site, it’s never a bad idea to make the process go more smoothly by following the guidelines and uploading a properly-created Google News sitemap.
By ensuring these things, you can get one step closer to getting your site in front of millions of people and building a brand value that will last for years to come. And ultimately, you will get featured shoulder with the other top-tier news sites on Google News.
