Google News Myths… and Tricks

Have you ever tried to get your site on Google News? I sure have, and I must admit, it took a little trick even for a huge site with tons of content to get in.

Anyways, the Google News Blog today has released a post about the truths and myths of Google News. To summarize:

• Images in article do not help your page rank better
• The Crawlers only visit the page once and changes you make to the page would not be reflected in the Google News
• Publication time do not matter in the ranking
• Videos and/or images alone won’t get you in, you need text and more text
• You can use the webmaster tool to discover and identify potential problems
• Sitemap does not improve rankings
• A good site design could improve the crawling process
• Having Adsense on the page won’t buy you rankings

Those are some excellent points, but more written for the publishers who already have got in Google News. For the many publishers who are still dreaming, there’s always that real human gatekeeper standing in their way.