Getting your articles in Google News - Myths and facts

The Google News team made an interesting post titled "Psst… secrets of Google News exposed!" at official Google blog. The post explained about various Myths and facts related with Google news. Posted by Andy Golding, Software Engineer at Google, Andy also shared about how Google include and publish (rank) articles in Google news.

Coming directly to Myths and facts explained.

1. Updating article once it’s included in Google news helps in higher rankings.
False, According to Google the current Google news crawler doesn’t revisit the articles. Every article/news in crawled only once so changing or updating the article will not help at all in fact any changes you make will not be shown at Google news website. I hope Google news crawler will soon have the functionality of revisiting the WebPages.

2. Placing image next to article improves the rankings.
False, Google do include images in news results and displays them next to your news item, but it cannot read the images and rankings purely depends upon text accompanied in your news item and not on having images in the news.

3. Articles with images and video are not included.
True, Google crawler cannot read flash, videos, images and other such type of multimedia content. Thus it’s a fact that if you new release or article doesn’t contain any text accompanying images or multimedia content then it will not be included at all in news results.

4. Time is a major factor for inclusion.
False, Google crawlers are frequently looking for content related to current event and top stories. There are lots of factors that Google algorithms take into consideration and choose the best articles from the cluster for ranking. Publishing articles prior, after or in midst of any event don’t improve any chances of rankings at all.

5. Articles with Google adsense ads rank high in Google news.
False, well this is the most disputed topic among webmasters not only for Google news ranking but also for Google organic results also. Google had always denied this fact and according to Google spokesman, "Using AdSense doesn’t have any impact upon our ability to crawl or rank your articles. We try to stay as objective as possible, and giving sites with our ads product a boost, well, that wouldn’t be very objective!"

6. Creating sitemap helps.
True, sitemaps may not help in achieving top rankings but they do definitely help in other way like meta data for our article, specifying category the news would be appear, specifying which articles should appear in Google news etc.

7. Redesign or change in site structure may affect my coverage in news rankings.
True, any drastic change in website design or structure, layout etc may cause problems with crawling of your article and hence overall coverage over Google new may be affected.