How to Submit Your WordPress Site to Google News (2024 Guide)
Do you want to get more traffic and exposure for your WordPress site by getting featured in Google News? Having your articles appear in the Google News section can be a huge boost for your brand authority and reach.
In this in-depth guide, we‘ll walk you through everything you need to know to successfully submit your WordPress site to Google News in 2024. We‘ll cover the latest requirements, best practices for optimizing your site, and provide step-by-step instructions for the submission process.
But first, let‘s start with the basics…
What is Google News and Why Should You Submit Your WordPress Site?
Google News is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It continuously scans the web for the latest news articles and presents them in a easy-to-browse format, typically grouped by topic or region. Google News uses a combination of algorithms and human curation to determine which stories, images, and videos to feature.
Getting your WordPress site‘s content featured in Google News can provide a number of significant benefits:
- Increased visibility and traffic: Google News feeds are highly visible in Google search results and having your articles featured can drive a ton of qualified traffic to your site.
- Improved brand credibility and authority: Being included alongside major trusted publications gives your brand a big boost in perceived authority, expertise, and trustworthiness in your niche.
- Faster indexing of new content: Google News bots tend to crawl and index accepted sites very frequently, so your latest articles can gain search visibility very quickly.
- Broader audience reach: Google News exposes your content to many readers who may not have otherwise found your site, helping you reach new audience segments.
Now that you understand the benefits, let‘s look at what it takes to get your WordPress site accepted into Google News…
Google News Eligibility Requirements and Content Policies for 2024
Google is very selective about which sites are included in Google News. They want to ensure only high-quality, trustworthy sources are featured. Your WordPress site must meet all of their official content policies and technical requirements to be considered.
Core content policies:
- You must have a track record of producing original, fresh, high-quality news content on your site. Simply aggregating content from other sources will not suffice.
- All articles must follow journalistic standards by being factual, original, objectively written, and not overly opinionated or biased.
- Content must be timely and relevant to current or recent events. Evergreen content is not eligible.
- Sponsored content, satire, user-generated posts, how-to articles, job postings, and strictly informational content will not be accepted.
- Your site must have robust standards around journalistic integrity, fact-checking claims, clearly labeling authors and sources, and issuing corrections.
Technical guidelines:
- Your WordPress site should be well-established with a consistent history of publishing news content.
- You must have a domain-specific contact page and a dedicated editorial staff page detailing your publication and senior staff.
- Pages must clearly display publish dates, author names, and labeled sections like Sports, Entertainment, Tech, etc.
- Page load times should be fast with low server connectivity issues. Google recommends page loads under 3 seconds.
- Your site should provide a good user experience on both desktop and mobile with intuitive navigation and readable, properly formatted text.
For a complete list of policies, visit the official Google News content policies page. Now let‘s look at how to prepare your WordPress site for Google News…
Optimizing Your WordPress Site for Google News
To give your site the best chance of acceptance, make sure you‘re following current technical SEO best practices:
- Switch to HTTPS: Google News now requires sites to support HTTPS to be included. Make sure you have a valid SSL certificate installed.
- Improve page speed: Optimize your images, minify code, leverage browser caching, and use a CDN to ensure your pages load lightning fast.
- Implement Structured Data: Properly tag entities and metadata on your posts using Schema.org structured data markup to help Google better understand and feature your content.
- Provide clear dates and authors: Double-check that publication dates and author names are clearly visible on all posts. Use structured data to explicitly convey these as well.
- Ensure mobile-friendliness: Your site must provide a great reading experience on mobile with properly sized text, easy navigation, and responsive images. Test your site with Google‘s Mobile Friendly Test tool.
- Create a Google News Sitemap: You‘ll need a specially formatted sitemap that only contains recent news URLs to submit to Google News. More on this next…
How to Create a Google News Sitemap in WordPress
A Google News sitemap lets Google quickly find your latest content and consider it for inclusion. You can create a news sitemap manually in XML format, but the easiest way is to use an SEO plugin.
We recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. It‘s the most popular WordPress SEO plugin and provides an easy way to generate your news sitemap:
- Install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin on your WordPress site.
- Go to SEO → Search Appearance → Content Types in your WordPress dashboard.
- Scroll down to the "News settings" section and toggle the setting on for any post types you want to include in your Google News sitemap (e.g. Posts).
- Select "In the last 48 hours" under "Default genre."
- Click "Save Changes."
- Go to SEO → General → Features.
- Toggle the switch for "News SEO" to enable it, then click "Save Changes."
- Your Google News sitemap will now be available at domain.com/news-sitemap.xml (replace domain.com with your own domain).
Other popular SEO plugins like Rank Math and All In One SEO also provide news sitemap functionality if you prefer to use those instead.
With your news sitemap ready, it‘s time to head over to your Google News Publisher Center account to submit your site…
Setting Up and Submitting Your Site in Google News Publisher Center
The Google News Publisher Center is where you will provide information about your WordPress site and officially submit it for consideration. Here‘s a quick overview of the setup and submission steps:
- Go to the Google News Publisher Center page and sign in with your Google account.
- Click "Add publication" to get started.
- Enter your WordPress site‘s URL and click "Next."
- Fill in the basic information details like your site name, country, and language.
- Upload a square and rectangle version of your site‘s logo.
- Choose a category that best describes your WordPress site‘s content.
- Add any applicable related URLs for your site (e.g. social media profiles).
- Enter your WordPress site‘s technical contact email.
- Click "Review" then "Publish" to submit your site for approval.
The review process can take several weeks. Monitor your Publisher Center account and watch for an acceptance or rejection email from the Google News team.
If rejected, carefully review the feedback for the reasons why and make the necessary changes to your WordPress site before trying again. Even if accepted, it can still take weeks or months before your content is regularly featured in Google News.
Tips for Improving Your Chances of Google News Acceptance
Finally, here are a few additional tips to maximize your odds of having your WordPress site approved and featured in Google News:
- Consistently publish unique, newsworthy content. Aim to publish at least 5-10 high-quality news articles per week to show Google you‘re a serious news source.
- Prominently display trust signals on your site like editorial standards, corrections policy, masthead, author bios, and contact information.
- Implement Google‘s Publisher Center metadata tags to provide more context about your site and articles.
- Engage users with multimedia content like videos, images, and infographics to complement your articles.
- Cross-link between relevant articles on your site to keep readers engaged and demonstrate topic authority.
- Promote your newsworthy content on social media channels to drive more engagement signals.
- Ensure your WordPress theme presents content in a clean, professional format on par with other major news publications.
By following the steps and guidance above, you‘ll be well on your way to having a Google News-optimized WordPress site and reaping the benefits of this powerful news search platform. Just remember that inclusion is never guaranteed and Google‘s policies may evolve over time.
To track your performance in Google News, use Google Search Console to monitor impressions and clicks from news.google.com. Also keep an eye on your Google Analytics traffic reports to see how much of your audience is coming from Google News.
Frequently Asked Questions
What types of WordPress sites are eligible for Google News?
Google News focuses on sites that primarily publish original, timely news content. This can span many different niches and topics like world news, politics, sports, entertainment, business, technology, and science.
Opinion pieces, satire, and sponsored content will not be accepted. Your WordPress site should have a consistent history of publishing factual news written by professional journalists or field experts.
How long does it take to get approved for Google News?
After submitting your site, it typically takes 2-4 weeks for the Google News team to review it. However, some publishers have reported wait times of several months, so be patient.
If you‘re confident your site meets all the guidelines but haven‘t heard back after a month, you can try contacting the Google News support team for an update.
What if my WordPress site is rejected from Google News?
First, carefully review the rejection notice from the Google News team to determine which policy violations or quality issues led to the rejection. Make the appropriate changes to your site to address these problems.
Once you‘ve made significant improvements, you can resubmit your WordPress site through the Publisher Center for reconsideration. Be patient and persistent. Many major publishers had to submit multiple times before final acceptance.
How can I tell if my WordPress site‘s content is appearing in Google News?
The best way to check if your content is showing up in Google News is to do a site search for your domain in Google News (e.g. site:yoursite.com).
You can also monitor your Google Search Console performance report and filter by the news.google.com search type to see impressions and clicks from Google News.
Do I need to resubmit my site if I change WordPress themes?
As long as your new WordPress theme still adheres to the Google News content policies and technical guidelines, you shouldn‘t need to resubmit your site. However, if you make substantial changes to your site structure or content strategy, it‘s a good idea to update your Google News Publisher Center profile to keep everything current.
By following this comprehensive guide and keeping up with the latest Google News policies, you‘ll be in a great position to successfully submit your WordPress site and enjoy the many benefits of appearing in Google News. Just remember to always put quality, unique journalism first.
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