Danny Sullivan of Google 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
Keep in mind that these aren’t actually new approaches, but really just largely established best practices, or a good refresher.
There was a significant number of complaints from publishers a few months ago about their sites and content not being indexed and ranked in Google News. It seems that most of these news publisher issues have been dealt with, there are still some publishers who are having issues. This post may function as a good reference for news publishers continuing to have issues.
The above posted tips as well as on Google’s publishers help center are the fundamentals to succeeding in Google News. Everybody should be aware of these tips so they can make sure that the site performs well in Google News.