Why is it so hard to integrate Ghost in Google News?

Hello,

Why isn’t there automatic integration of our articles on Google News?

I found this tutorial but I’m stuck at the paragraph “Create a template for the Google News sitemap”.

It would be nice if someone could help me.

Thanks :slightly_smiling_face:

You’re on the starter plan right, right?
This tutorial needs a customized theme.

@Cathy_Sarisky : Yes, but only for the moment. I’m going to upgrade my plan to creator as I approach the number of 500 subscribers.

So it interest me to know how to customize it :slightly_smiling_face:

I’ve responded to several posts like these, you don’t need to do anything specific to get listed on Google news. Having a Google news site map is no longer required.

Our site gets indexed without any modification and is on the starter plan on ghost pro.

How old is your website?

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I’ve just added the default RSS feed into Google News and I’ve had no problem at all.

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@bert_o_t Ok but then why are they leaving this article online then? And Ghost customer service told me the same thing not long ago : that I had to switch to Creator to modify my theme.

My site has existed since 2017 and was on Wordpress before and all my articles were included in Google News :confused:

@ngeorger Thanks! I hadn’t yet integrated the RSS feed into Publisher Center. I just did this, but I don’t know if it affects Google News ?

Has your website structure remained exactly the same as it was with WordPress?

On the contrary, it provides a clean and standard source for robots and crawlers, so at least under a technical approach is even better, but I don’t have a clue regarding “google prioritisation criteria”.
At least, they won’t be rejected ;)
You’re welcome!, We all know a bit of everything and the key is to share, regards from Chile.

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PD: Remember to check if your reed is serving your expected content ;) If not, you should customize it and that belongs to another topic.

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It seems like it takes 8 months to multiple years to show up in Google News now simply due to their own changes in how restrictive (and non-transparent) the approval and review process is.

However, my sense was that this largely affected more recent sites that were created since the pandemic or so.

Definitely recommend that you upload your news sitemap and regular sitemap when you’re able to, and there are also other optimizations you can do to categorize your stories as news articles, etc., which is not the Ghost default.

I had to hire someone to do this work because I couldn’t figure out how to do it myself (not a coder!). I do wish Ghost made it easier. That said, I think Google News has just made this very hard due to its own internal, undemocratic policies.

It’s frustrating because there are MANY sites that do show up in GN that are not high-quality or authoritative content. But I wish you luck in showing up eventually. I feel like it’s more of a stamp of approval vs. a true traffic driver, at least in terms of a local news perspective.

From what I’ve seen, general Google search and the bigger social channels bring in much more referral traffic than GN (from what I’ve seen) — even if you have high visibility. But it still means a lot to show up there, for any number of reasons.

Best of luck!

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