News sitemaps for publishers around the world

Posted by Benoit Lafortune, News Support Team

If you're a news publisher and want greater control over how your articles get included in Google News, we've got a great opportunity for you: Today we made Google News sitemaps available globally. If your site is currently included in Google News, you can now directly submit your most recent articles via News sitemaps in all the languages we support. You can also specify keywords for each article to tell us more about them so we can better place them in the appropriate news section. You'll get error reports specific to Google News explaining any problems we experienced crawling or extracting articles from your site. And you'll receive additional information on the types of queries that lead Google News users to your site.

Why should I use News sitemaps? So that you can tell us which articles you'd like us to crawl.

When should I submit my articles? As early as possible. You can submit your articles as soon as you upload them on your site. The earlier you submit, the sooner we can crawl and extract them. The result is that you'll boost your publishing power, and we'll process your most recent articles more quickly, since we recrawl all News sitemaps frequently.

How do I submit a News sitemap? Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Verify your site. If your site is currently included in Google News, the presence of the News Crawl link on the left indicates that the news features are enabled. If your site isn't included in Google News, you can request inclusion.

Sounds good. How do I check the status of my submitted News sitemap? Once we've verified site ownership through your Webmaster Tools Account, you can view details about your site, including error reports, from the Dashboard by clicking on your site link in the Site column and then clicking the Sitemaps tab.

What if I don't use News Sitemaps? We don't favor sites that use a News sitemap over those that don't. We still crawl all news sites quickly. However, a News sitemap is a great tool to give you greater control over how your content appears in Google News and to alert you to any errors we might encounter when we try to crawl your site.

What if I have more questions about News sitemaps? Take advantage of all these benefits by submitting your articles today by visiting our Help Center for Publishers.

In case you can't tell, we're pretty excited about this new feature. We think News sitemaps can be a real help to publishers and we're glad we can make them available to more publishers. Let us know what you think -- we'd love to hear from you.

First click free

Posted by Christina Cacioppo, News Support Team intern

As a college student, I use Google every day – email, news, documents and spreadsheets – you name the product, and I probably use it. This has made my summer internship with the Google News Support team even more illuminating. Though I thought I knew the ins and outs of many Google products (and there are lots of them), I'm actually only a beginner.

The News Support team interacts with users on a daily basis; we’re the go-to people for help and troubleshooting for our readers and publishers. We work hard to provide a comprehensive experience for Google News readers - from occasional surfers to news junkies. Whether we’re adding new sources or supporting new features (like video!), users are one of our primary concerns. Does a certain source have original articles that you will be interested in? Will you be able to access these articles?

One feature I’ve become more aware of is First click free. If you aren’t familiar, First click free is a way for publishers to share their subscription-only content with Google News readers. All articles that are accessed from Google News are allowed to skip over the subscription page.

In practice, this means that when you click on a link from Google News, you'll be able to see the article without receiving a prompt to login. If you would like to read more from the same source and choose to click on another story, you'll be taken to a registration prompt. We like to think of First click free as a simple system that allows you to test drive a news source before signing up on their site.

Finally, if publishers of subscription-based sites aren’t a part of our First click free program, we’re still happy to include their content – we’ll just tag the source as “(subscription)” to let you know that when you click on that article, you'll be directed to a subscription page.

If you love the current features of Google News like First click free (or if you don’t) you can share your thoughts with us on the Google News group. We look forward to hearing from you!

Getting even more news via feeds

Posted by Greta Ghizzo Van Everen, News Support Team

A few weeks ago we blogged about how Google News personalization works. Now let's take a look at getting the most out of Google News feeds.

For one thing, you can get articles from your favorite news source directly on your iGoogle page. Here’s what you need to do: perform a Google News search using our site: operator. In the results page click on the link "RSS" or "Atom" located on the lefthand side of your screen. You’ll be taken to a new page that lets you choose where to receive this feed. You can add this feed to your iGoogle page, your favorite newsreader or another application you like.

Remember that you can subscribe to feeds for any sections of your personalized Google News homepage, or for any of the queries you perform in Google News. Another very nifty use of feeds: you can also subscribe to the content of almost all of our 41 editions. So if you speak another language, or just get a kick out of reading news headlines in different languages, you can set up as many feeds as you like for as many topics as you like. For instance, let’s say that you only care about articles on “Google” coming from the Italian edition, but don’t want to create a dedicated section on your Google News homepage for this topic. Here’s what you can do:

- go to the Italian edition of Google News using the link available at the bottom of our homepage
- perform a search for “Google"
- click on the RSS or Atom feed links in the results page (placed in the same location for all our editions)
- subscribe to the feed.

Don’t forget to check out our Terms of Use and feel free to post on our Help Group to share ideas and tips from other news fans.