Google News is a news aggregator app developed by Google. It helps users stay up-to-date on the news that matters to them and the world, enabling them to dive deeper into current events as well as discover diverse content from a range of different publishers. It presents a continuous, customizable flow of articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web.
Benefits of being a Google News publisher
Some of the benefits of getting your website included on Google News as a publisher include:
- Google News enables users to learn about and engage with publishers
- The Google News experience always includes prominent branding where stories are surfaced and provides monetization opportunities for publishers, including advertising and streamlined subscription sales through Subscribe with Google
- Publishers can choose between direct control and traffic using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) or custom styling of feed-backed content to provide the best reading experience
- Users can subscribe to specific news providers and topics, read content online or offline, and bookmark and share articles
- Google News makes it easy for readers to find relevant and interesting content by personalizing what they see in the ‘For you’ tab
- The app uses machine learning to get better at recommending personalized content over time, adapting to users’ habits and routines
You don’t need to sign up through the Publisher Center to be in Google News rankings, but it does provide certain benefits.
- Design, brand, and customize your publication’s sections and content in Google News
- Run ads inside your content area in the app. Google News supports ad serving via Google Ad Manager, including premium solution ads. Publishers can use paywalls in Newsstand through Subscribe with Google
- Publications with business terms are eligible to be in the Newsstand section of the app (in applicable countries/regions). Publications are independently selected for Newsstand by Google merchandising team based on promotional timing, quality of user experience, and relevance to promotional theme
Google News technical guidelines
Google News uses a computer algorithm to automatically crawl news websites. To help the system determine which of your webpages are articles, make sure your site follows Google News technical guidelines. Here are some common areas where publishers encounter technical issues:
- Article URLs – Make sure your article URLs are unique and permanent. Sites that display multiple articles under one URL, or that don’t have links to pages dedicated solely to each article, or those that do not associate each article with a permanent URL, will not be included on Google News
- Article links – When Google News crawler scans your site, it looks for HTML links with anchor text that includes at least a few words. It cannot crawl JavaScript, graphic links, or links in frames
- Article format – Google News crawler cannot crawl PDFs or other non-HTML formats
- Robots.txt or metatags – To include your content in Google News, Google user-agents Googlebot and Googlebot-news must be able to crawl and index your site. Make sure the directories that host your articles are not blocked by a robots.txt file and metatags or header specifications do not block access to your article links
- Language – Google News doesn’t show sites with articles that display multiple languages in a single article. If your site has language-specific sections, separate publications for each language. This ensures users are presented with content in their language
- Multimedia content – Google News cannot include audio files or multimedia content. However, it can sometimes crawl supplementary text on pages with this type of content, including some videos from YouTube
Google News feed guidelines
Google News delivers high quality content for high speed and offline reading through mobile devices. However, great reading experience also depends on the quality of the publications in Google News. To make your publication browseable, follow the Google News feed guidelines, which are closely reviewed by Google News team after you publish your feed content. These guidelines are what keeps an edition in the Google News catalog.
- Content freshness – Feeds need to offer up-to-date content that matches the freshness of your website’s content. You should try to only include recent content in your feeds
- Full content – Users must be able to read full-length articles without exiting the app. This may require that you update your feed to include complete articles, or create a feed specific to Google News. Take action of these:
- Missing content and “Read more'” links
- One-paragraph articles
- Articles that break off mid-sentence
- Large images – Users want to see beautiful, large images. The shortest side of an image should be 800 px, but ideally larger for better display on larger screens
- Duplicate images – Avoid embedding thumbnails or the same image in multiple sizes, or slightly different croppings in your feed as they may all appear in the article
- Duplicate articles – Google News system uses the tag in the feed to identify new articles. If you update an article on your website and it generates a new tag, we’ll show the 2 versions of the article in the edition. To avoid this duplicate:
- Ensure that your feed doesn’t generate a new ID for article updates
- Know how and when to use the isPermalink value
- Missing media – Google News team reviews your edition and ask you to fix the following issues:
- Podcasts with no audio
- Articles that reference audio, but don’t include it
- Broken slideshows
- Images referenced in the article text that don’t appear
- Videos referenced in the text that don’t appear
- Article display – Articles with good formatting improve your publication’s feel. A well-formatted content feed helps display your articles properly. This includes:
- Using paragraph breaks. Make sure you have breaks between headers, sub-headers, and paragraphs
- Proper character encoding
- Image captions that appear near the associated images
- Readability – Clearly written articles with correct spelling and grammar make for a much better user experience
Google News technical feed requirements
If you encounter issues with article updates or missing article contents, like media assets; you can refer to Google News technical feed requirements to learn how to build a feed that renders all of its embedded features.
Google News content policies
Google News content policies play an important role in ensuring a positive experience for both its users and publishing partners. In some instances, Google News may make exceptions to these policies based on artistic, educational, historical, documentary, or scientific considerations, or where there are other substantial benefits to the public.
- Original content – Google News strives to make it easy for users to find news that is independent and original. Sites accepted into Google News should be a significant source of fresh, original content
- Transparency – Visitors to your site want to trust and understand who publishes it and information about those who have written articles. That’s why news sources on Google should provide clear dates, bylines, information about authors, the publication, the publisher, company or network behind it, and contact information
- Ads and sponsored content – Advertising and other paid promotional material on your pages should not exceed your content. Google News does not allow content that conceals or misrepresents sponsored content as independent, editorial content. Sponsorship, including, but not limited to, ownership or affiliate interest, payment, or material support, should be clearly disclosed to readers. The subject of sponsored content should not focus on the sponsor without clear disclosure
- Personal and confidential information – Google News does not allow the sharing of a private person’s confidential and personally identifiable information (e.g. medical records or financial information)
- Copyrighted content – Google News does not allow content that infringes anyone’s intellectual property rights and will respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement. Repeated infringement of intellectual property rights, including copyright, will result in account termination
- Sexually explicit content – Google News does not allow content that features explicit sexual imagery primarily intended to cause sexual arousal
- Graphic violent content – Google News does not allow content that incites or glorifies violence. It also does not allow extremely graphic or violent materials for the sake of disgusting others
- Hateful content – Google News does not allow content that promotes violence or harassment against an individual or group based on ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity
- Medical advice – Google News does not allow sites primarily aimed at providing medical advice, diagnosis or treatment
- Dangerous and illegal activities – Google News does not allow content that promotes or facilitates dangerous or illegal activities, including self-harm, such as self mutilation, eating disorders, or drug abuse. It also does not allow content used to threaten or organize violence or support violent organizations
- Harassment and cyberbullying – Google News does not allow content that sends messages intended to harass, bully, or physically or sexually threaten others
- Deceptive practices – Google News does not allow sites or accounts that impersonate any person or organization, or that misrepresent or conceal their ownership or primary purpose. It does not allow sites or accounts that engage in inauthentic or coordinated activity that misleads users. This includes, but isn’t limited to, sites or accounts that misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or that direct content at users in another country under false premises. This also includes sites or accounts working together in ways that conceal or misrepresent information about their relationships or editorial independence
- Spam and malware – Google News does not allow excessive repetitive, duplicate, or unoriginal content, misspellings, grammatical errors, or gimmicky character use. It does not allow links to malware, viruses, or other harmful software. It also does not allow sites engaging in link schemes intended to manipulate a site’s ranking in news results or generate unnatural traffic
Ranking your website on Google News
As a principle, submitting your content via feeds or content labels in the Publisher Center shouldn’t interfere with your site’s ranking in search engines. Participation in an advertising program like AdSense has no effect on ranking of your site in Google News, or on any other Google search engine.
Google News aims to promote original journalism and expose users to diverse perspectives. It doesn’t accept payments to expedite or improve a site’s search appearance or ranking. You can improve your site’s ranking by maintaining a Google-friendly website. Ranking in Google News is determined algorithmically by these factors:
- Relevance of content
- Prominence
- Authoritativeness
- Freshness
- Location
- Language
Ranking in the “For you” tab is also determined by these factors:
- Interests
- Usability
Designated topical experiences in the Newsstand tab of the Google News app are created by Google News staff to help users discover new sources they might be interested in. News results you see within these experiences are selected and ranked by algorithms.
How to measure traffic from Google News
Publishers can track their content’s performance based on how it appears in Google News.
a. Section-based content
If your content was provided through RSS feeds in the Publisher Center, you can track it through news.google.com or news.url.google.com referrers. You can set up tracking in Google News Publisher Center to provide more detail and track content that is rendered natively within the Google News Android and iOS apps. Do not add your feed analytic numbers coming from the Publisher Center in addition to referrers, since they both measure the same behaviour.
b. Web-crawled content
To differentiate the traffic from Google News and the rest of your traffic, you can look for the HTTP referrer. This is applicable if your content is:
- Crawled from your site or from the content labels you added in the Publisher Center
- Shown directly from your site on Google News, or linked out directly to your site
Readers with the referrers “news.google.com” or “news.url.google.com” are incoming from the Google News App & web browser. You can use your own on-page analytics for further analysis of your standard HTML and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) articles.
How to get published on Google News
You can use the Publisher Center tool to share your content with Google News by submitting RSS feeds, website URLs, or videos. Even if you don’t set up a publication in the Publisher Center, Google may find your site through their normal web crawl.
How to submit your website for inclusion on Google News
You no longer need to submit your site to be eligible for the Google News app and website. Publishers are automatically considered for Top stories or the News tab of Search. You just need to produce high-quality content and comply with Google News content policies.
How to remove your website from Google News
If you do not want to surface in Google News, you can block access to content on your sites without affecting your continued indexing and ranking in Google Search.
