Google News - any tips for getting news articles picked up?

[buksida]

I have searched through this forum but couldnt find much related to Google News (news.google.com).

We have a large daily news website that used to get picked up by Google News quite often and naturally sent us a lot of traffic. Recently it very rarely gets picked up and I was wondering if there is anything that can be done to improve its chances of appearing on the Google News page again.

Mods: If this is in the wrong place or can't be listed please let me know, thanks!

[classifieds]

One of my sites is in G News for about a year and there appears to be no rime or reason for when the articles are included. Sometimes there will be none for two weeks and then every article we post for a month will get picked up.

When I signed up I submitted a list of the specefic subdirectories and on each page in the site I include a list of the "latest" news for that particular category.

When it's working it seems to work really well.

[helpnow]

Are your news items original, or borrowed from elsewhere?

[buksida]

Thanks for the replies, classifieds, when you say "signed up" what are you refering to, I havent actually signed up for G news, it just started picking up our content.

helpnow, all articles are original content.

[mcskoufis]

I think that Google News (which is an entirely different story than Google Search on many aspects) automatically adjusts its crawling frequencies.

If the story you submit is already covered in thousands of other news sites, it may not crawl it.

I have 2 news sites in Google News and they seem to be crawling my news within 3-4 minutes maximum from being published.

[gidspor]

My site gets crawled and posted very fast. Within the half hour on every article. But I have noticed one thing, there is a content size filter. If an article is to small, it won't get listed on Google News. Which is in my opinion a good thing.

Google News is one thing they do very well.

[gtmash]

...and some people are suing just to stay OFF Google News...

[panicbutton]

Writing something NEWSWORTHY is usally a good start...

[buksida]

Thanks again for the CONSTRUCTIVE replies.

We publish original content daily (Asian geo-politics and analysis) however I'm wondering if more regular uploads may help since we currently only do one. It has on occasion picked us up within a few minutes of the upload but the frequency it does this has dropped dramatically.

Additionally I just checked and it has picked up yesterdays articles but we never get on the front page anymore, this was my main question really. How to get back on the G news front page.

[venice]

What works for me...

Fresh Content Daily: I start the day checking google news (and elsewhere) for topics related (even remotely) to my field. If the topic is picking up and 15, 20, 30 related articles are appearing I'll write a 500-700 word original (but topic related) piece and post it.

Google news appears to crawl it within the 3-4 minute range and it will appear on the google news homepage if the topic block (all articles) is on the move.

I get anywhere from 1 to 6 articles per day posted and not all make the homepage. Sometimes, if I go too off topic, they don't even make the topic block. I have not yet figured what determines that but I feel it is somewhat related to time of post, length of post, relationship to block (too similar=not good, not similar=not good, original+similar=yum yum), and factors I'm still figuring out.

I don't know how many topic blocks google uses but if you refresh the page you'll see multiple variations of the block featuring different headlines, photos, etc...

I'm usually positioned in with the big media names but don't appear on all rotations, not yet anyway. :-)