Does anyone here have much experience with Google News - specifically - theories or information on how Google prioritizes and displays stories in Google News? If 100 sites write a story on the same topic how does Google News decide which of the sites are listed first? I doubt they use backlinks/PR as a factor as 90% of news stories they show are brand new pages that are not indexed and don't have any PR. That's just a guess though...
To be honest never used it before as for backlinks etc, however what i do know is that when you use prweb.com and pusblish a story it will eventaully show up at google.news.com. I just checked whether one of my articles was still there to be found however it got dropped already from Google's news index.... so it wont last long... i read somewhere that there is this trick to get higher rankings etc using PRweb however at the moment i cant find the post or article... And i dont know anything about the ordering of the index
hmm. Never used prweb...I suppose I'll add it to my list of things to check out. I'm not really looking for ways to get into Google News though...I'm already "in". Just trying to formulate a theory on how they rank/place articles in their listings.
I would be very interested to hear more about this too. I do Google news searches on my main KW, and one of my competitors has lots of articles that come up. I couldn't find anything online about how to get your site included in Google's News sources. I guess you have to be extremely established, high PR, etc?
They look at the distribution of words in the article and surrounding pages on the web. If the article matches the query well it is deemed relevant and gets a high score. Other factors include the importance of the source, timeliness of the article and importance of the news story relative to other stories in the news currently. - Michael
Another drawback to prweb is that you immediately get added to a spam list, even if you use the option not to display your email address. In the one experience I had with them, in fact, the spam started showing up right after I entered the news release and before it even went live at prweb. Not worth the hassle in my opinion.
For a long time I had "This Sig For Rent" as a signature, for humor rather than as a genuine proposition. However I recently received an offer (not monetary) and was happy to oblige. - Michael
Strange. I did opt in to show e-mail address, got a 4 rating and sitributed all over the place (inc Google News) and haven't received one spam e-mail from it.
Hmmm... sometimes it's hard to tell where the spammers are getting an email address but in this case the email address we used at prweb was one created especially for that purpose so there was no doubt about where the spammers got it -- and as I said the first spam started arriving the morning after the ad was submitted before it even officially went live. Other people have commented that they haven't had thios problem with prweb -- leads me to wonder if they just have better spam filters than me
Here's where you "apply" for inclusion in Google News: http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/request.py?contact_type=recommend&submit=Continue
How do you (or anyone else) think they would determine "importance of the source" in relation to placement? I highly doubt it's tied to PR, as a lot of the top results in the news section are PR nothing pages that are only a few hours old.
Based on the homepage PR I'd say. Maybe they even include data on how quick previous news items gathered links and from where... It doesn't seem to be geotargeted, I get news from Canadian/Aurtalian etc. sources showing quite often.
I would guessed that same thing, but at this point it doesn't appear to be true. The site I'm working with is new - PR nothing. It's only been online 2 months or so. I did a write up and included a relevant term. My article was listed # 1 in Google News out of 40,000+ results - many of which have PR 6 -8 home pages on their sites. So far it looks to me like PR doesn't have anything what-so-ever to do with placement in Google News.
Did you (roughly) analyze the top 10 or so for KW density, KW in title, KW in meta, KW in H tags, BLs, OBLs etc.? Maybe even scan the articles to see how many 'related words' are there.
Just curious, is it worth posting a "Newsletter" or newsworthy item on one's site and submitting it to Google News even if your site is not a "News" source?