Google News - profitable or not?

[Mohammad_R]

I am thinking about creating "news" section and submitting it to Google News for consideration.

Is your website part of Google News? Do you get lots of visitors from Google News?

Please exaplain. Thank you.

[goodroi]

You can get traffic from Google News. Just remember that the traffic you are getting is very different from the search traffic. Also not every site is acecpted into the program.

[Shak]

what is the official criteria for getting included in Google news

anyone submitted and been approved/not approved?

Shak

[Johan007]

Yes my new pages get indexed in Google News despite my Bourbon penalty and no new pages being indexed in the regular Search Engine! I get very little traffic from Google News – there is no justice in this world!

As long as you have a good quality site with regular update news articles (own journalists I think) then you will be given the ok by a human editor. The editor only clears the pages that are news worthy and this is easily done if you have kept "?" in your URL and not re-written it like every SEO seems to want to do. If you have re-write on your URL then Google News will need some other way to identify “news” from other content on your site but I don’t know how they would (RSS feed maybe?)

[alika]

Our news section articles are being indexed by Google News. They will first review your site after submitting it for consideration.

However, in our case, it took about 4 months for our news to be indexed and show up in Google News. Apparently, their system requires that a provider's naming system for each page must contain at least 4 numbers (e.g. www.website.com/1234/news or a variation thereof - as long as there are at least 4 numbers). They did not tell us that little fact. Only after sending several "reminders" that their tech support came back to us and told us we need to revise our page naming system to incorporate at least 4 numbers. So we did. After 4 months, our news are now indexed.

In addition to increasing our traffic, being in Google News brought us different set of audiences given that we cover broader range of topics in our news articles. Good for Adsense, too, in terms of keyword diversification. Now, we have keywords over and beyond the normal keywords our previous content attracts.

[Harry]

The numbering requirement was removed.

Google News is excellent to gain more credibility. People who use this service really seek the information that you provide and are therefore the best filtered visitors for your Web site.

Humans do evaluate your Web site for participation, therefore, spammers are few - but I have seen some -

Media folks and pr persons keep a careful watch on Google News article - which is good for a news provider. We get lots of thanks from product vendors and request for further interviews when vendors see our articles in GN.

If you are thinking that there are SEO benefits, forget about it. GN is for humans, not bots.

[alika]

The numbering requirement was removed.

When? Because we got accepted Feb this year, and our news got into the feed only in May 2005 because we didn't do the numbering requirement.