Getting Your Joomla Site into Google News

Written by Steve Burge

We had great news from one of our clients during November. BleacherReport.com is just over a year old now and is regularly updated by a team of over 400 writers. They submitted their site to Google News and after being accepted, found that on average, their daily traffic has doubled.

The boost in traffic from Google News has been a daily roll of the dice - some articles have brought several thousand visitors to the site, while others have garnered only a few dozen hits. Typically, this is a reflection of the topic's general popularity. Articles about the New York Yankees are always hits, while the Cleveland Indians are less so.

So how do you get listed? There are technical qualifications:

Have a unique URL for each page. Joomla does that.
The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. The best solution is to include the year, month and date in the URL. Joomla does that with SEF Advance.
The homepage URL can't change. Joomla does that.
Make sure that you're links are in static HTML rather than images or Javascript. Easily done with Joomla and a good template designer.

And there are also quality qualifications:

Articles need to be of a decent length. At least 300 words seems to be the minimum and Google seems to prefer 500-700 word articles.
Daily, fresh content.
If you do include press releases and non-unique content, rewrite at least the headline and first paragraph and include a photo.

Click here to see what Google News makes of their site.

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Your Comments (9)

Daryl

February 12, 2008

I've been in contact with an outfit that is pretty good at getting 'stories' ranked in google news. we just did a trial article, and it came right up as they said it would. This did not carry over to normal Google searches. How much impact does getting ranked in Google News have on your sites normal Google rankings?

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Steve Burge

February 12, 2008

Hi Daryl

It won't affect your rankings at all, but it will bring more traffic. Google News is extremely popular.

Barrie North

July 02, 2008

Steve... no Google news goodness for you?

Steve Burge

July 02, 2008

Alledia posts into Google News? No, I don't think we meet a single one of their rules for entry

The biggest obstacles are a lack of multiple authors, no unique number in the URL and blog rather than news content.

Tom Thorns

July 04, 2008

Ok, so once you're in to Google News they say you can submit a special sitemap (a Google News sitemap) that only lists the content you want included in their news feeds. It's basically a special type of feed and they spell out the format it has to be in.

Does anyone know of a joomla component that can make these feeds? One similar to rd_rss would be ideal.

JoomlaMafia.com

July 05, 2008

We are coming out with a component called Mafia Headlines, Its a sitemap for joomla 1.5.3 to submit news to google directly.

Look for it next week.

Andrea Olivato

December 09, 2008

Heya nice article...just wanted to singnal my little php script which creates a Sitemap for Google News for Joomla 1.0.x and 1.5.x, using open sef or sh404

You can find the opensef version here
http://blog.andreaolivato.net/software/google-news-sitemap-generator

The sh404 is still in testing, you can find news on the comments
http://blog.andreaolivato.net/open-source/google-news-sitemap-generator-for-joomla.html#comments

Hope this helps!

Cosmic Fantasia

March 11, 2009

You now need to a link to a contributors page. This si new from memory and I guess makes it easy for there editors to see multiple authors. Most of the articles on a site I would like to submit, have author alias's. Does anybody know an extension or a good way to make a contributors page/s that list authors alias's and their last say 5 articles?

manny

June 10, 2009

can this be done using Artio SEF as well or does it have to be SEF Advance?

i'm using Artio today...