Hello folks,
Recently one of my blogs was accepted as a Google news authority. This was an interesting exercise because at least at the time of this posting, there were no step by step instructions on how to do this.
In order to become a Google News Partner the site has to pass a review with Google, and this is done by a real person. There are currently about 25,000 website approved for Google News Syndication Partner.
The rewards for making the cut are extreme.
You can expect to have your article indexed in Google News in under 10 minutes. You can also expect your site to get traffic from the primary news sites that draw from Google News. You can also expect inbound links from all of the sites that pull from Google news within your topic or theme.
Here’s a diagram showing where Google News is located for those who may be a little uncertain in the primary search matrix.
I have been shocked to recently talk to people who are not aware of Google News, and that it is a news search engine.
As Sue Bell and I discussed in our last Theme Zoom podcast, Google is rewarding dynamic and active (non-static) websites with higher rankings across the board. By dynamic we general mean content that updates at least once daily.
How to Qualify for Google News Partner
1. Providing news and updated news-worthy industry information.
2. Provide news-worthy material in at least TWO TOPICS OR CATEGORIES on the same site.
3. Have a site layout that seems like a magazine style or news-tone site. *Google does not like a normal blog layout.
4. Your site cannot be overly “pitch” or have a sales agenda that outshines the news-worthy information.
5. Your site must have a high quality standard of writing.
6. Content needs to be original high-quality articles.
7. You will need to use a special site map and mark-up language that is specialized for Google News. This is a pain.
8. You need to have more than one editor and/or author that is actively on your staff or working on the site.
Again, keep in mind that Google will personally review the site to make sure it matches the standards expected. This quality control is important to Google because so many networks and sites draw upon Google news in order to provide content for various topics and themes.
Theme Zoom has been writing and talking about “authority websites” for years. This is the first time that I have seen a site achieve this status in such a short amount of time.
I would say that the primary reason one of my websites achieved this status is because there were two full time expert researchers working on two primary topics with extreme passion and interest.
Obviously this is difficult to do by yourself, if you have all of your attention and energy focused on your business. If businesses knew how relatively easy it was to become an authority news-worthy site in some niches, they would probably re-route a significant chunk of their advertising budget and spend some time building an authority news site.
That kind of monetary diversion doesn’t usually happen if you don’t “grok” the value of indirect sales that will come from “owning the conversation”, because those sales can be hard to track, making the value harder to prove. Google news status is definitely more an aspect of “branding” than direct marketing.
The truth is that, until now, there were no real “maps” out there on how to create a “news-worthy” authority site and partner with Google to gain unlimited traffic via mass syndicated news networks around your main themes.
Continue reading part 2 of this post.
- Russell Wright and the Theme Zoom Team
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