How To Optimize Website for Google News

You have a website you think looks or acts like CNN or BBC News. However, unlike the two media giants, your website is nowhere to be found in Google News. You have questions in your mind. Why is my site missing from Google News? How do I get my site included? Right now, in most cases Google News does not consider personal sites or blogs in its news portal. Google is simply treading on what’s news and what’s personal opinion, so there’s no question why blogs are not included in Google News. Besides, there’s Google Blog Search that does the job.

So to answer the question on how to optimize a news website for Google News, here are some guidelines:

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How To Show Images In News Results

At Google News or at search results for certain search phrases, we see images associated with news articles. At some point we ask, how do we let Google display our images in the same spot?

Google offers tips on how to display images associated with news articles on the web without making guarantees. So if you have a news article that has an image, you may want to do the following:

Label your images with well-written captions.
Creating well-written (read: descriptive, keyword rich) captions is similar to creating well-written alt text: it allows search engines to relate the image with text content in the body of the page.

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Google News Widget For Your Website

If you’re a webmaster whose website visitors are interested in reading the latest news, Google may be able to help you address those interests. Google just announced through its AJAX API blog that Google News can now be incorporated on websites so visitors don’t have to leave a website to read the latest news.

You can customize what kind of news reports you’d like to see (Technology, Oddities, Entertainment, etc) or specifics (Barack Obama, Star Trek, Phoenix Suns). I see it as similar to Google Alerts that only serve specific information that we prefer.

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How Accurate Does Google News Extract Its Sources?

I was searching for the term “Youssif”, an Iraqi boy whose face was badly burned by masked men who abducted him outside of his house in Baghdad. I’d like to incorporate his story with the blog I recently posted at Living in Hong Kong. I guess the news originally appeared in CNN so I’d like to find another source. Naturally, I turned to Google News and searched using his name.

The first result showed a familiar title but whose source is Sports Illustrated, a sister site of CNN.com. I gave it a try because it could be compared to any sports feature that showed compassion for helpless folks.

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