http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/answer.py?answer=150415

http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/the-layered-look-how-google-news-is-integrating-the-social-web/

In the previous post in the Getting Traffic from Google News series, we discussed how to get traffic from Google via Google News by leveraging the various ways to appear in a publication that is already featured in Google News.

Now, let’s talk about the holy grail of Google News exposure – having your site BE a source of news for your topic in the Google News database.  If you’d like to be one of the 25,000 publishers that is sharing 1 billion clicks a month, this just might be for you.

Can Any Site Get Into Google News?

I saved the best scenario for last because, quite frankly, it’s also the hardest to do. It’s not as easy to get into as Google web search. As much as that may sound like a contradiction in terms, you have a MUCH better chance of getting your site into Google’s web search database than into Google’s news site database.

And that’s simply because most sites aren’t news sites, and neither are they news-worthy.

But.

If your site breaks news in your industry, has unique content that isn’t published anywhere else, or has a unique slant on the news, under certain circumstances, your site could be a Google News source.

Let’s look at the official path to becoming a Google News site, then we’ll come back and talk about some tips from one of my favorite sources of search related news.

How to Become a Google News Site, The Official Version

When you decide you want to become a Google News publisher, the first thing you’ll have to decide is whether you’re going to change your current site to meet their guidelines, or whether to start a brand-new site.

Most people are going to start new sites, as Google has some very specific technical requirements for becoming a Google News site, as you’ll see on their help page for Google News publisher hopefuls.

Should you submit once you meet the requirements? Technically you could. But I’d say not so fast. Why just be technically ready when you can demonstrate through your site that your site truly is influential and worth of being included in Google News?

A human being will actually have to take a look at your site and decide whether or not to consider you. Put your best foot forward.

How?

How to Get Into Google News Addendum with My Own Wild Theories and Specultion

I’ve been in several publications that appear in Google news as news sources, but have yet to create one myself, mostly due to time constraints and lack of adequate staffing for my own company, never mind a publication. So take my words with that in mind.

For what it’s worth though, this is my advice, based on what I’ve observed and the applied knowledge I have from helping clients get ranked in Google’s web database and get exposure in other Google web properties over the years.

First, you may want to take a look at the different niches within the site by browsing the categories and popular stories on the Google News home page. Study them and get a feel for what news sites are like.

Second, fill the content deficit. Is there a region you represent that isn’t listed? Is there a niche in your industry that only has a handful of sources? Or do you have better access to news or events than some other publication?

Third, take the advice of other sites that have tried, whether they have failed or succeeded. We’ll come back to that in a sec.

After the Submission Form – Valuable Clues From Also-Rans

For now, let’s just say that you’re sure your site is up to snuff, then you can proceed to the submissions form for Google News. Remember, they are going to be looking at your site, and it may not be simple technical proficiency that gets you listed.

Remember I mentioned that you can learn from others who have tried to get into Google News?

According to a Rejection Letter from Google News that appeared in Search Engine Roundtable, here are a few reasons that you’re not likely to get into Google News.

If your publication does not:

1. Publish news
2. Publish daily
3. Have a staff of writers and editors, rather than one individual,
4. Represent an organization rather than a person,
5. Display both general and contact information for the organization

- it looks like you can expect to be rejected.

What does that mean for you? Make sure you meet those items just in case,  so there won’t be a problem to begin with. Good luck getting into Google News. If you make it, I would totally make myself available for a staff writer position.

Which I’ll then tell the entire free world about.

Hint. Hint.

Additional Resources:

Getting Into Google News Revisited, from Search Engine Roundtable

How to Get Into Google News, from The Online Journalism Review

The Google News Blog. That  article e where they tell you that there are 25,000 publishers in Google News is still on the front pag. If that sounds like a lot, compare that to the billions of web pages they’ve indexed in their search engine.

In Part One of Getting Into Google News, we talked about the traffic benefits of getting listed in Google News, and how to do so using a press release. Next, we’ll delve into how this can be achieved by having content in a publication that’s already in Google News, and what the advantages and pitfalls are.

Before we do that, let’s address a common concern many people have with focusing traffic efforts on Google properties that aren’t part of the web search.

You may be thinking that anything that doesn’t focus your efforts on getting into Google’s web search is a waste of time, or that diverting some of your limited time into pursuing Google News listings is just not worth it. After all, Google has come out with new services that generated a lot of buzz when they were coming out, then abandoned or failed to develop them.

While it’s true that Google sometimes decides not to put certain services they offer at center stage, Google News is definitely Not on the back burner. Though it had an unusually long Beta period, they are constantly improving their news service, testing features like FastFlip to enhance the online experience of the news.

The traffic you will get from Google News is worth the effort, and there’s no reason for it to slow or otherwise inhibit your inclusion in web search. In fact, the extra links you may get could enhance your search ranking.

With that out of the way, let’s answer the question: How Can You Get Into Google News Through a Publication?

To be clear, this method of getting into Google News is through having your featured article, which would include a byline that has a link to your site, appear in a publication that already gets featured in Google News. It’s like having an article appear in Business Week, as opposed to being BusinessWeek yourself.

It follows then that the first thing you must do is discover where news items for your industry would appear in Google.  This is a breeze for a site that features Technology or has business to business customers. It’s harder for, say, a skin care company.

But it’s not impossible, not nearly.

Your first step is to go to Google and do a search for keywords that have led people to your site before, as well as any term you believe your site is about. In this case, skin care. Among those search results, you’ll find sites that have appeared in Google recently for those search terms.

They’ll fall into three categories:

1. Industry publications
2. Press organizations, and,
3. Local news sites

Now, all you have to do is get on the staff of one of these publications, or at least be featured by them once. This is much easier said than done, of course. Most of them require you to have a good reputation, proven expertise, and writing skills in publications you’ve been featured in already. And if you haven’t been keeping up with article marketing, it’s that much harder to demonstrate that you’re any good.

There’s a bit more to it than this to give you the best results, but that’s enough information to get you started. Next time we’ll talk about how to actually BE a  publication that Google News gets its news from in your industry.

Why Do You Need to Be in Google News?

Because that’s where the eyes are.

We know that reading the news is one of the top four things people do online, and that if you want to be found online as well as off, you need to be a part of that activity stream.

Since more people get their news from Google News than CNN, that definitely includes Google News, if there was ever any doubt.

It’s also faster to get into than Google’s web results. While it’s true that you can initiate content discovery by Google in seconds if you know what you’re doing, getting that content into the database still takes anywhere from a few hours to a few days. And to get ranked for the keyword you want? That could take months if it happens at all.

But showing up in Google News for a keyword you want to be ranked for can happen in as little as 15 minutes, especially if your site is set up to be one of the sites Google reprints headlines and excerpts from.

Not to mention that if your topic is in the news, as Google, Inc. often is, your site could be among those linked to above the web results. Click through to the web results for Google to see an example.

Google News can also get your headlines in other places that your prospects may be following that include or overlap Google News results, such as Moreover Headlines, and Google Alerts.

So, now that you know the benefits, let’s discuss how you, dear reader, can get in on one of the Top 17 Traffic Sources of 2010, Google News.

Getting Into Google News

There are three primary ways to get in:

1. As a publication that is featured in Google News for your industry
2. In a publication that already appears in Google News
3. In a press release

Above, they’re displayed in order of difficulty. We’re going to discuss them now in order of ease.  And the easiest way to get into Google News is by submitting a press release to a site whose releases appear in Google News. I’ve discussed how to get into Google news with articles since 2005, but before today, only told the full story of how to do this with press releases in my High Profile Article Marketing kit. The basics of the method are very simple.

First, find a site whose press releases appear in Google news. You can either go and search Google News for your topic and reverse engineer which sites will appear, or you can go to a site like WebWire or PRWeb and pay the $20, $80, $120 fee to get your press release mentioned in Google News.

With the first way, you may find sites that get listed for free, however, you also have to look out for the fact that some sites are favored on certain days of the week, or won’t show up at all if some major news breaks. Figuring out how likely it is for a free press release to get you into Google News is tricky enough, but then you also have to try and figure out if you’ll be ranked.

For that reason, I always go with the second way, and just submit my press release to several sites, including PRWeb and Webwire.

Next time, how to get into Google News through another publication.

Doing our Google Today column, we have my good friend Kevin Singarayar sending us updates several times a week, all the way from Singapore. Google Today is similiar to our former Google Tuesday column, which brings you updates about Google that you as a business owner would find useful, and why, with occassional opinions and witticisms.

If you have questions about Kevin’s column, you can send them to ask@asktinu.com or try him on Twitter. I’ll still be reporting some Google news myself, though Kevin will be our main, consistent source.

News ==> The format of the Google News has changed, on the level of the additional articles.

Clip ==>

Last Thursday we launched a new format for story pages on Google News. These are the pages you see when you click the “all [#] news articles” link of each cluster of articles which cover the same news event–or “story,” as we say on the Google News team.

(If you still don’t get what they’re referring to, click the link to take a look at the screenshot.)

Link ==> Google News Blog: More ways to see the story

Why It’s Relevant ==> Context. Google News is adding more context to the news – that timeline feature seems like it would be particularly useful. Imagine getting breaking news in Twitter that there’s an earthquake somewhere. You turn to Google News for some verified or official updates about where it was, how many injuries, what to do to volunteer or where to send donations.

With that timeline you could instantly see who has the freshest news – and if corrections need to be made on the fly, as often happens, the most up-to-date source probably has the best information. In the time it took you to read that, you could be taking action already.

News ==> Search Engine Land reminds us that today from 10 am to 11: 30 am Pacific time, Google is having a Searchology Event: An “Insider’s Perspective On Search”.

Links ==> If you can’t watch the event live, visit the home page of Search Engine Land for their Live Blogging.

And here’s Google’s Press Release about the event.

So What? ==> As the SEL article asserts, the first event they had of this nature in 2007, they announced Universal Search, which had a big impact on SEO, which then had an impact on your business. Google skipped the big deal last year.

And I just smell something coming up. In the past, I’ve been able to either break news or spot breaking news on Google by watching them during their “calm before the storm” moments. This feels like one of them. It’s odd that the event wasn’t covered on the big Google Blog and that a news search about it brings few results.

Could be nothing, but I’d keep one eye on the live blogging just in case.

This is just delicious. From the Google News site, you can now scour old archives of various newspapers, as of yesterday.

Users can also narrow their searches to specific time periods or publications of interest.

Users can search archives from Google News (news.google.com) by clicking on the ‘News Archive Search’ link. For selected queries, users of Google web search (www.google.com/) may also see links to the top three related articles from the news archives integrated at the bottom of the result page

More from Search Engine Watch:

“The goal of this service is to allow people to search and explore how history unfolded,” said Anurag Acharya, Google distinguished engineer, who played a major role in shepherding the new product.

Google has partnered with news organizations including Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post, and aggregators including Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and HighBeam Research, to index the full-text of content going back 200 years.

Archived news results can be found in three ways. You can search the news archives directly through a new News Archive Search page. News archive results are also returned when you search on Google News or do a general Google web search and your query has relevant historical news results.

And coverage from BusinessWeek:

Clicking on a search result will yield a summary and—here’s the part online publishers are sure to love—give users the option to buy the full article. “If I’m LexisNexis, it enables me to create an ongoing revenue stream from searches that lead to my content,” says Allen Weiner, an analyst at researcher Gartner. “I can market to those people and up-sell to them.” Contrary to the idea that Google devalues paid content, the search engine could increase the value of content and subscription services that users previously didn’t know existed.

Thiink of all the research you can do. We always knew the internet would live up to the promise of being a mega-libarary, and one could argue that it has far too many books. But this fingertip access to so many offline media giants is a step to evening out the quality…

Did anyone else notice that Google Alerts sent “as-it-happens” were either blank or had strange characters last night? Only one other person so far has told me it was down. If it was though, it’s back up now…

So, “Allegedly”, there’s this kid named Ori Alon who supposedly invented a more relevant search algorithm who now works for Google. Alon is said to be an Israeli doctoral student.

From haaretzdaily.com:

Search engine giant Google recently acquired an advanced text search algorithm invented by Ori Alon, an Israeli student. Sources believe Yahoo and Microsoft were also negotiating with the University of New South Wales in Australia, where Alon is a doctoral student in computer science.

Google, Alon and the university all refused to comment, though Google confirmed that “Ori Alon works at Google’s Mountain View, California offices.”

So let me ask you this… what kind of world do we live in, that I couldn’t have thought of that, and hired someone to create the algorithm for me? Yes. The sound you hear is me turning green with Jealousy. And on Palm Sunday. Bad Tinu!

Orion, as it is called, which Alon developed with faculty, relates only to the most relevant textual results. In addition the software, which currently operates only in English, offers a list of topics directly related to the original source.

“For example, if you search information on the War of Independence, you’ll receive a list of related words, like Etzel, Palmach, Ben-Gurion,” he explained. The text will only appear on the results page if enough words relevant to the search and the link between them is reasonable. Orion also rates the texts by quality of the site in which they appear.

You see? It’s so simple that it’s freaking brilliant. So go read the rest of the article, Google buys search algorithm invented by Israeli student, to get the rest of the story.

“Cuz I ain’t one to gossip. So you didn’t hear that from me.”

Update 7:50 pm Eastern – Looks like ZDNet was onto this story as well.