If you’ve already submitted your website for listing, then you only need to check your application status. If haven’t done so, here is the guide on how to check google news application status.

Usually, it takes between 1-3 weeks to review your application, but it could even be faster than a week. The one I submitted was reviewed within three days.
If you haven’t done so, you might want to try it now, but it’s advisable to check the guidelines to make sure that your website meets the standard set by Google.

15 Rules of Google News Application

Google doesn’t just include any website in its News List, certain guidelines have been put in place to help maintain what it calls, “Fairness and consistency when determining which sites we include.”

You’re advised to read these rules guiding Google News website submission; a default might lead to site being removed entirely from the Google News index, and ensure that your site follows Google Webmaster Guidelines.

The rules are segmented into three:

News general guidelines
News technical guidelines
Additional news inclusion guidelines

News general guidelines

1. Some of the websites that can’t be accepted into G News listing are how-to articles, advice columns, job postings, hotel listing, and real estate listings, and other sites that do not cover the recent event.

Sites should primarily cover the latest and breaking news; news that’s timely and covers analysis on the latest development, which has datelines and bylines.

2. Your website must behave with original contents and must be properly attributed in case it’s a report got from the news agency.

“If your site publishes aggregated content, you will need to separate it from your original work, or restrict our access to those aggregated articles via your robots.txt file.”

3. Google News pays much attention to websites have author biographies and clearly accessible contact information.

What is in vogue now is for reporters of notable media organizations to include their Twitter handle in their report, Google loves that, it shows that the media outfit will be accountable in its reportage.

4. Do you want your website to be listed in Google News, then you need to have an About Us page, “sites must not conceal information about their owner or primary purpose.”

5. Another criteria is: Readability of articles correct spelling and grammar make for a much better user experience.

This speaks more to the number of Ads that you should be on a page. Ads must not exceed the content so that your site visitors aren’t distracted. It has been found out that crowding content with ads distracts site visitors.

Bottom Line: “Limiting your use of distracting ads allows users to more easily focus on your article content. Advertising and other paid promotional material added to your pages should not exceed your content.”

6. Ensure that your article URLs are unique and permanent. It’s against the rules to edit your permalink after it’s already been indexed. Make sure you do all the editing and perfection before your article goes live.

7. Google crawler doesn’t crawl JavaScript, graphic links or links found in frames. It scans for HTML links with anchor texts that include at least a few words.

8. Google News allows you to upload PDFs or other non-HTML formats, however, it only crawls HTML articles. If you must include any of the non-supported formats, ensure to support it with reasonable content, which explains what the PDF is all about.

9. Robots.txt or metatags. In order for your content to be included, Google News user-agents Googlebot and Googlebot-news must be able to crawl and index your site.

10. Multimedia content. It doesn’t include audio files or multimedia content; however, we can sometimes crawl the supplementary text on pages with this type of content and do include some videos from YouTube.

Additional News inclusion guidelines

11. Syndicated content is also acceptable, but must be properly attributed.

12. If your site is already listed and you believe that your contents are copied by another site without giving you the credit, Google allows you to file a petition against such a “copy and paste” website.

13. If you want your website to remain and get good ranking on Google News, you must avoid content created primarily for promoting a product or organization, or selling or monetizing links within an article.

14. If you must publish promotional content, ensure to separate them from news content because you risk being delisted if Google finds non-news content mixed with news content on your site.

Bottom line: Indicate on top of your content when publishing promotional content.

15. Your site must be user-friendly. Your site should load quickly, be mobile-friendly, use URL redirects rarely, and avoid behavior intended to trick users.

It’s also technically advisable to submit a Google News Sitemap through a Search Console account.