News Box and Top Stories Optimization: Breaking Into Google’s News Results

Top Stories and Google News

• Top Stories is the news block that can appear in Google Search results for queries with a news angle.
• Google News is Google’s separate news product, with its own app and site.
• Both draw on eligible news content under the same policies.

Google’s ranking systems guide also mentions local news systems that “identify and surface local sources of news whenever relevant,” including through “our ‘Top stories’ and ‘Local news’ features.”

What Has Changed

Publisher Center remains in use for News Showcase and Reader Revenue Manager, per the same announcement. So define a favicon and a site name for Search, since those now represent your publication in Google News.

Following Google News Policies

Google’s News policies say content “should follow best practices for article pages” and must not violate Google Search’s overall policies, its spam policies or its policies for Search features. They add feature-specific rules:

• Ads and sponsored content: advertising “shouldn’t exceed your content”, and Google doesn’t allow “content that conceals or misrepresents sponsored content as independent, editorial content.”
• Misleading content: no “preview content that misleads users to engage with it by promising details which aren’t reflected in the underlying content.”
• Transparency: news sources should provide “Clear dates and bylines”, information about the authors, publication and publisher, information about the company or network behind the content, and contact information.

Violations can lead to removal from news surfaces, and Google notes that “In cases of repeated or egregious violations, a site may be no longer eligible to appear on our news surfaces.” Those policies apply to news surfaces only; ineligible content can still appear elsewhere in Search if it follows the relevant policies.

Technical Setup

• Crawlable, indexable article pages, each with a clear headline, date and byline in the page itself.
• Article markup, optional but useful: Google’s documentation says you “can add Article to more explicitly tell Google what your content is about”, such as that it’s a news article and who wrote it. See Article schema.
• A news sitemap, if you publish news regularly. Google’s news sitemap documentation says: “Only include recent URLs for articles that were created in the last two days”, and that a news sitemap “may have up to 1,000 news:news tags.” Older articles stay in your regular sitemap; see XML sitemaps.
• Fast, stable pages help readers, especially on mobile; see Core Web Vitals. Google’s news documentation doesn’t set a speed threshold for eligibility.

Editorial Practices That Match the Policies

• Timeliness: publish while the story is current and update it when facts change, noting what changed.
• Original reporting: add facts, sources or analysis that other coverage doesn’t have.
• Bylines and author pages: who wrote it and why they’re qualified; see author pages and bylines.
• Honest dates: change the published or updated date only when the article actually changes; publication dates covers how Google reads them.
• Corrections: a visible corrections policy and corrections noted on the article.
• Separating news from evergreen content, so news sitemaps and sections carry actual news.

Measuring News Visibility

• Search Console has a Google News performance report for traffic from news.google.com and the Google News app, separate from the Search performance report.
• The Search performance report shows clicks and impressions from Google Search, including queries where your articles appear.
• Your analytics show referral traffic from Google News.

Watch how quickly new articles are indexed and which stories draw news traffic, rather than expecting a fixed placement.

When Top Stories Isn’t the Goal

Freshness is one of the factors Google lists for ranking content on news surfaces. A business site publishing occasional announcements, or a site of evergreen guides, competes in regular results instead. Presenting content that isn’t news as news doesn’t change that, and a headline or preview that promises details the article doesn’t contain runs into the “Misleading content” policy. The broader results page is mapped in SERP features.

Before an article goes into your news sitemap, check when it was created: if that was more than two days ago, it belongs in the regular sitemap only. And change an article’s published or updated date only when the article itself has changed.