Google shares tips for success in Google News search results

Danny Sullivan, public liaison for Google Search, posted on the Google Webmaster blog some tips on how to succeed in Google News in 2019.

“We’d like to offer some best practices and advice we hope will lead publishers to more success within Google News in 2019,” Sullivan wrote.

The advice. Here are key takeaways for Google News SEO best practices:

• Make sure to review the Google News Publisher Help Center.
• Make your headlines clear and accurate — see this advice for more details.
• Provide accurate times and dates by making sure that you show one clear date and time on the page and you use structured data to communicate the time.
• Do not “artificially freshening stories” to try to get more play from an old story or write a new story with substantially the same content from previous old stories.
• Do not produce duplicate content by making sure not to allow Google to index scraped content, rewritten content from other site without any additional value, republished content. You can also canonicalize the republished content.
• Be transparent Google says by using bylines, information about authors, and contact information for the publication. Google also said you should review their content policies.
• Do not be deceptive by not allowing “sites or accounts that impersonate any person or organization, or that misrepresent or conceal their ownership or primary purpose,” Google said.
• Google also said make sure not to participate in link schemes, which is general Google SEO advice.
• Make sure to use structured data, as mentioned above to help richen up your search results including using AMP.
• HTTPS: Make your pages secure by using HTTPS and other privacy and security measures.
• Want more help? Reach out to Google and Top Contributors at the Google News forums

Are these new recommendations? These are largely established best practices — a good refresher, rather than new approaches.

A few months ago, we saw a significant number of complaints from publishers about their sites and content not being indexed and ranked in Google News. While we believe most of these news publisher issues have been addressed, we still see a number of publishers still saying there are issues. This post may function as a reference for news publishers continuing to have issues.

Why it matters. If you publish news, being in Google News can be an important driver of traffic to your publication. These tips posted above and on Google’s publisher help center are the fundamentals to succeeding in Google News. Everyone — from developers to news writers  — should be aware of these tips so that they can ensure the site performs well in Google News.