Increase traffic with Search

Every month, Google sends people to news sites over 24 billion times. Google Search puts the world's information at your fingertips, helping people find useful information for billions of queries every day.

How does news content get featured on Google?

• Text
• Rich results, using the attributes tagged on a page, like review stars or recipe information
• Images
• Videos

💡Best practices for news content to get featured:

• Use images relevant to the news article instead of your logo
• Tag important information in attributes
• Follow best practices for images and video

Which features (text, rich results, images, or video) drive my Search traffic?

Click Search Appearance on the Search Console homepage to find out the different kinds of rich results that your site was shown in

News content appears in two places on Google Search:

• Top stories
• News tab

Top stories shows relevant, quality news, and changes based on the person’s query, device, location, and more.

News tab shows news-related results.

News can also appear on Google News, which is not part of Google Search. Google News is a news aggregator service available on Android, iOS, and the web at news.google.com. It displays different product features such as headlines, personalized recommendations, local news, and more.

Google's systems are designed to present information that is relevant, helpful, reliable and created for people, not search engines. Google prioritizes content based on several factors, which news organizations often demonstrate:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

Experience is your first-hand or life experience in a topic. For example, if someone is looking to buy a shirt, they might want to hear from people who have tried the same shirt.

Expertise is your knowledge or skill in a topic. For example, if someone is looking for health advice, they might want to hear from physicians or researchers.

Authoritativeness is how much you are known as a go-to source for a topic. For example, if someone is looking to renew their passport, they might want to go to the official government page.

Trustworthiness is how transparent you are about how your content is created, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, or linked pages about the author or your news organization.

💡Best practices:

• Create helpful, reliable, people-first content
• Assess your content with our 32 questions
• Create an About page for your organization and author pages for your journalists

Google doesn't depend on a single date to estimate when a page was updated or published. Follow byline dates guidelines to help Google when an article was published or significantly updated.

💡Best practices:

• Add a user-visible date on your article and feature it prominently
• Label dates clearly with text like “Posted”, “Published”
• Specify time zones if labeling a time
• Prevent other dates from appearing on the page, like dates for related stories

Structure for ongoing news stories

• Add labels and additional dates like “Updated,” or “Last updated”
• Add timestamps and timezones
• Avoid updating a story without adding significant information to it.
• If you use multiple pages for updates, link to each page and include timestamps and publishing dates

Google automatically considers your site for Google News as part of normal web crawls, allowing you to appear in Top stories and News tab.

💡Best practices to appear on Google News

• Check if your site is appearing in Google News by searching “site:yoursite.com”
  • Alternatively, use the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console
• If your site doesn’t appear, check your manual actions and review the eligibility requirements.
• Place more content than ads
• Clearly label ads
• Avoid pop-ups or excessive ads which might be annoying or slow down pages
• Tell Google whether an outbound link is sponsored or ugc by labeling it in the rel attribute
• Avoid paid, spammy, or user-generated content links without tags
• If you have a paywall, implement the appropriate structured data

• Google Search Essentials are what makes your content eligible to appear and perform well on Google Search. This includes your web pages, images, videos, or other publicly-available material that Google finds on the web.
  
  
• Google News policy and eligibility
  
  
• Google Search Visual Elements Gallery shows how different content shows up on Google Search
• Google Search Central YouTube channel to find out what's new in Google Search, tips, and tutorials. You can find interviews with industry leaders, ask me anything sessions (AMAs) with Googlers on the Search team, and topical podcasts posted weekly