The aim of Google News is to filter through the world’s news and make timely news accessible to readers in a way that’s easy for them to read, understand, and put to use.

So what does this mean for your website and your site?

Lots of traffic, credibility, and authority.

If that sounds like something you’d like for your WordPress site (and let’s be honest, who wouldn’t) then read on to find out everything you need to know about how to submit your site to Google News.

What is Google News?

Google News is a news aggregator that curates a customizable flow of recent news articles and stories from the last 30 days.

Today, it’s even more than that as Google News stories can surface in other Google products, such as:

• Google News feed (duh)
• The “Top stories” section on the SERP page
• The “News tab” on the SERP page (like the one you have for images, so to speak)
• Google Discover, Google’s new feed based on an improved Knowledge Graph able to provide custom results based on a single user’s search history.

Here’s what Google News looks like:

Content is organized into categories, depending on your location and language settings. As a reader, you can also customize the feed to cover stories you are interested in.

“Your site + Google News = traffic, credibility, and authority. ✅ That’s an equation we can stand behind! 🤓 Learn how to submit your site to Google News with this guide”

How to Get Your Website on Google News, Discover, and News-Related Sources

Google News works differently than Google the search engine.

The latter sends out crawlers that scan the web for updates and index those updates. Google News has crawlers too but they mostly crawl and index websites and content that are deemed of high-quality, comply with Google News content policies or have already been approved in the past.

In fact, until December 2019, you had to manually submit your site to Google News for it to be considered. But that’s no longer the case, as Google announced this:

“Publishers are automatically considered for Top stories or the News tab of Search.”

Nice. So you don’t need to worry about doing anything, right?

Just sit back and wait for Google News to feature your site and drive more traffic to it…? Well, not exactly.

Although anyone can get into Google News, you still need to meet certain criteria like:

• You have to create compelling content on a daily basis. It has to be news that’s relevant to your audience.
• You have to follow the Google News content policies, which cover standards for writing, accountability, authority, readability, technical guidelines, and news quality guidelines.
• You should never neglect the overall Webmaster guidelines which include the quality of your content, design of your content, and the technical aspects of your website (using WordPress and a professional theme will satisfy this – just make sure it loads fast).
• Once you meet these guidelines, it’s time to get started with submitting your site to Google News. I’ll show you how to do it properly later in this post.

Before that, let me clarify one important thing:

Do You Need to Submit Your Site to Google News?

Yes and no.

Let’s recap. At the end of 2019, Google announced the new Google News, which on top of several improvements and a new UI, brings something new to the table:

“We developed a new story-understanding technology to map the people, places and things involved in a news story, and then draw connections between them.”

The new technology powering Google News is a combination of several machine learning techniques, including BERT models.

What is BERT?

I know what you are thinking. It has nothing to do with Sesame Street.

For the purpose of this blog post, you should know that BERT is a natural language processing model able to consider the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it.

Basically, it is a way for Google to better understand the content on a page.

In part because of this new technology, Google no longer requires you to submit your site to Google News.

Now, just because you can automatically appear in Google News doesn’t mean you will. Let’s increase your chances and manually submit to Google News.

Don’t worry, it doesn’t take long.

How to Submit Your Site to Google News

Got to Google’s Publisher Center and click Add publication:

Now, you’ll need to fill out some specific information. It’s all pretty self-explanatory:

• Description of your site.
• The category that best describes your site.
• Primary language.
• Website URL.
• Point of contact.
• Tracking (your Google Analytics code).

If you are using the same Google account for both Google News and Google Search Console, you can easily verify your site.

Just click verify in Search Console next to the Website property URL box:

And if you need more help, you can check out our GSC setup guide.

Next, you’ll be able to add an RSS feed to your publication, add a custom logo, and even set up Google ads if you’d like to monetize your content.

Once you’ve filled in everything that’s required and agreed to the terms and conditions, you’ll be able to publish:

Told you it wouldn’t take long to submit your site (if you ignore the review process which takes 2 – 4 weeks).

But wait, there’s more.