Most publishers agree that it’s become essential to have their content indexed and listed on Google News. Google are pretty selective over which sources they choose to use and there is a strict procedure that each publisher needs to follow before they consider including you as a source. A while back I applied on behalf of The Times to be listed on Google News South Africa.

This is a screenshot of the form that I originally submitted:

We’ll I’m happy to say that after a few weeks of nervous silence, I finally received this in my mailbox this morning:

Hi Colin,

Thank you for your note. We apologize for our delayed response. We’ve reviewed http://www.thetimes.co.za and will be adding it to our index for Google News. You should be able to find your articles in Google News within a few weeks. While we’ll strive to include as many of your news articles as possible, please be aware that we can’t guarantee the inclusion of your content in Google News.

Thank you for providing your articles to Google News.

Regards,
The Google Team

It will be very interesting to see how much of a difference this actually makes to our web traffic in the future…