With the New Year now underway, we'd like to offer some best practices and advice we hope will lead publishers to more success within Google News in 2019.
General advice
There is a lot of helpful information to consider within the
Google News Publisher Help Center. Be sure to have read the material in this area, in particular the
content and
technical guidelines.
Headlines and dates
- Present clear headlines: Google News looks at a variety of signals to determine the headline of an article, including within your HTML title tag and for the most prominent text on the page. Review our headline tips.
- Provide accurate times and dates: Google News tries to determine the time and date to display for an article in a variety of ways. You can help ensure we get it right by using the following methods:
Show one clear date and time: As per our
date guidelines, show a clear, visible date and time between the headline and the article text. Prevent other dates from appearing on the page whenever possible, such as for related stories.
Use structured data: Use the
datePublished and
dateModified schema and use the correct time zone designator for
AMP or
non-AMP pages.
- Avoid artificially freshening stories: If an article has been substantially changed, it can make sense to give it a fresh date and time. However, don't artificially freshen a story without adding significant information or some other compelling reason for the freshening. Also, do not create a very slightly updated story from one previously published, then delete the old story and redirect to the new one. That's against our article URLs guidelines.
Duplicate
Read more from our friends at Google Webmaster Central
