Our website gets about 1-3 million page views a month. It's on Google news.
Our traffic sources are:
'Google' (presumably organic search) -- about 40% of all traffic.
'Googleapis.com' -- about 25% of all traffic
'News.Google.Com' -- about 15% of all traffic
Direct, SM etc -- about 20% of all traffic.
Occasionally, there's something called 'discover.google.com' and 'news.url.google.com', but these are very rare.
We put up an average of 25 news articles a week, and most of these are either exclusive or exclusive when put up (as in, we're the first to put up the story, even if others are expected to join later). On weekends, we don't put anything up for about 50 hours continuously as we don't work on weekends.
We've been on Google news under the current domain for about two years, but under another domain for 5.5 years (since 2011) before that.
PROBLEM:
The site used to do fine (not sure when it changed though). The issue is that if someone goes to news.google.com and searches for a topic on which we've just posted, our articles don't show up. They will start showing up if someone goes to news.google.com after 5 or 6 hours and does the same search.
In other words, it looks like news.google.com takes about 5-6 hours to index our stories. That's what I used to think was happening, till I noticed that if I put in the name of my website, and click on the suggested 'source' link, the stories do appear, even before the 5-6 hours are done.
What could this be? Why won't they show up for the topic till 5-6 hours are over? And why do they show up for 'source search'?
What is even more weird is that if you do the 'site: ' search, they don't show up either, till 5-6 hours are done. I've been tracking this issue for two weeks and I've not seen any change.
However, if you go to regular google and do a 'site: ' query on our domain, you'll see that stories are indexed instantly. You can also see all the stories, including the latest ones, when you click on the 'news' tab next to the general search (where it gives you the option of looking for 'videos', 'books' etc.)
We did change our host about a month back, not sure if this is related to that. The new host is closer to our target market of India, and therefore farther from Google's servers, which has had the impact of increasing fetch times for Google. Not sure if that's a factor. I think not.
Another thing is that almost all, if not all, of our stories appear on News.Google.Com eventually. But in case of many other publishers, including big ones, about half of their content is filtered out from news.google.com.
Anyway, the long and short of the problem is that I get traffic from news.google.com within minutes of publishing my stories, but someone going to News.Google.Com doesn't see my stories till 5-6 hours have passed. By then, everyone and their uncle have put out a story on the same topic and competition is intense.
What could be going on? We have amp. We have a sitemap.
