Anyone have any Google News ranking tips? (7)
Hi guys,
Anyone have any advice on ranking higher with Google News? I'm in the sports niche so is ultra competitive with the tabloids dominating the first page, but have seen other blogs ranking very high for certain news pieces.
So far outside of the standard SEO practices, unsure what else we can really do.
Any advice would be appreciated!
Well have you applied to Google to get indexed in the news feed?
That and following the quality guidelines would be the first two steps https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?
After that, then there are all the advanced techniques, but without these first two steps in place, you really won't get too far.
Originally Posted by cmdeal
We have one site that has been indexed for many years. Never really paid much attention to it. What we did notice recently though was when we decided to "upgrade" the quality of our content to be comparable to what you would find in the mainstream media, the ranking of our stories definitely improved.
The other thing is to try and "be first". If you simply regurgitate mainstream news that has already been indexed you get nowhere fast (depending of course on the volume of news in your vertical).
There are some guys in our verticals who have this down to an art. They are able to get news to "stick" and I believe that it is due to their quality. I beleive we have not delivered consistent enough quality for our stories to a: ranke high and b) stick for longer.
Best of luck!
Thanks justred. The frustrating thing to date is we're just not seeming to rank very high for anything despite our competitors of a similar quality and actually worse article quality managing to do so - I assume it's down to the SEO value of the site which is struggling more than it used to.
The other thing is - our niche is heavily reliant on actual news coming from higher authoritative sources such as newspapers, so difficult to "be first". But I've seen blogs like ours ranking high in G news so I know it's possible despite that and we are getting decent numbers through other news aggregators. Perhaps in the first instance I need to work on improving the site's general SEO and see if that will make a difference.
I think it's more than just being first. I know that is so hard. For us too, You need to get your news shared by sites with higher citation value in google's eyes. This can be a bit of a slog but if you can make your site look like a "serious" news source and make sure that the journalism is of a high quality you stand a better chance.
It's a bit of a chicken egg thing. In our niche there is an independent guy who is outranking even newspaper sites. He cracked the challenge of getting his news shared by high quality sites and on a very regular basis. Some monster sites seem to link back to tons of his stories that is on topic to them.
I think it is incredibly tough these days but if you can have a unique voice and do quality outreach to influencers in your niche (find them using tools like Buzzsumo) you can make a decent crack of it (get them to share your stories both directly and through Google so the great G sees it). If they don't just want to do citation, offer to write them a unique summary of the story as long as they link back.
Mate that's killer advice - thanks! I've been working on deals with social media accounts to share our articles and will seriously look into working with some bigger authoritative sites too.
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