
It’s always nice when you get a hit on Google News.
Sometimes smaller publishers are at a disadvantage compared to big media sites. The big ones are crawled at an interval of minutes, while smaller sites can be crawled with a day in between. That’s not great for breaking news.
But there are some things you can try to overcome that and see a surge in Google News traffic.
First one is simple, try a sitemap ping.
Bookmark the following URLs and hit them right after you publish a post. They ping the main sitemap and news sitemap.
- https://google.com/ping?sitemap=https://www.rebelmouse.com/sitemap.xml
- https://google.com/ping?sitemap=https://www.rebelmouse.com/sitemap_news.xml
(Note: Replace www.rebelmouse.com with your domain.)
Second, submit to Google Search Console.
Go to your Search Console and "submit the URL" you just posted at the very top. Test the live URL and then select Request Indexing. This is probably the fastest way to get a post into the index.
A third thing you can try is to freshen up older content.
Look in your RebelMouse Stats dashboard for the top 20–50 posts, sorted by pageviews in the last hour, to find older pieces of content that still perform well. Open one of those posts and follow these steps:
- Update the content significantly, change the headline, optimize the image, and update the post body to make it relevant and timely to what is going on now.
- Use the SEO tab of Entry Editor to pick a new, more optimized URL going for the exact search phrase you want to win in Google News. Changing that URL is vital because it signals to Google that this is a new URL worthy of a Google News moment. RebelMouse automatically 301s the previous URL to the new URL so the new one will gain PageRank juice from the past.
- Go to the Advanced tab of Entry Editor. Before hitting update on the post, change the publish date to today’s date and time. This is a very important step.
- Finally, ping the sitemap URLs mentioned above and submit the URL in Search Console.
This is a formula that we’ve seen success with. It’s worth testing to get your uptick in Google News traffic.
If you have any questions about Google News and how to get the most out of it, email support@rebelmouse.com or talk to your account manager today.
Not on RebelMouse yet? Get in touch today to get started.