Getting Included in Google News - Dynamic Pages and more
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Google's news crawler can spider dynamically generated content, such as .php, .asp and others, but it can run into problems which can prevent articles from appearing on Google News. It recommends that you use static URLs rather than dynamic URLs, or set your content management system to produce static looking links.
If you must use both dynamic and static URLs, block the Google bot from accessing dynamic ones to avoid duplicate content penalties. You can block the Google bot in robot.txt file.
Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links
Google News does not recognize or follow Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links which link to articles. Its automated crawler is best able to crawl plain text HTML links.
Snippets of Content
Google shows content snippets in search results with keyword occurrences. It requires sites to have NO content, other than the article, in an area between the title and content.
Registration and Subscription Content
If you run on subscription revenues, Google can add more ROI to your bottom line. There are three ways to handle this, but first you must allow Google in. The G-crawler has to see content to classify it, and pay-walls prevent this. You can work around this issue by putting in an exception for the Google bot.
First, make sure the Google bot is allowed to crawl your pages (robot.txt).
Second, configure your servers to serve registration when Google bot comes from 66.249.64.0/20.
Once you let Google bot crawl your subscription pages, those pages will be featured on Google News. From that point on there are several options:
First click free. With this option visitors can reads full versions of your articles when and only when they come from Google News/Web Search. All other clicks on the site lead to the subscription page. Google claims they’ve increased subscription rates for some publishers with this method, and I believe it works best.
Once users read full articles, they have a clear idea of the quality of your articles, which is better than any marketing message. For example, from time to time I read tech-related Wall Street Journal articles and I am often amazed at their quality, depth and level of connections with stakeholders in the industry. After reading one of their articles I am more likely to subscribe then after reading only a small summary.
You can contact Google to arrange the first click free feature. Please note that only Google News/Google Search users will have access to the full article.
A subscription page. This one is plain and simple. When users click on the link they are directed to subscription page. This is not effective in getting more subscriptions.
Snippets of the page. You can also feature a partial snippet of the article with an offer to subscribe.
Feeds
Google does not require RSS feeds, but you can definitely benefit from having one. Feedburner offers free feeds, and all blog platforms produce RSS feeds by default.
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