Got something newsworth to say?  Want to extend the reach of your existing news site to the entire world?  Want to let Google News help you do it?  Getting your site added to Google News is fairly pains free.  Here are a few things to know to get you started.

For starters, Google News doesn't allow for the submission of single articles, like some news sites.  Instead, entire websites are crawled and news articles are extracted.  The submission process is pretty easy.  Just so we're clear on one thing, though:  submitting a site to Google does not guarantee inclusion in Google News.  Once your site is submitted, Google will review it and determine whether or not to add it to the news crawler's list of sites.

Before you submit your site, there are a few other guidelines to keep in mind.  Your site's hierarchy must be structured so that all pages including the full text of your news story must be at a permanent URL that does not change.  This includes the main page's URL.  In addition, the URL must include a unique number of at least three digits.  However, this number cannot simply be a four digit year number (http://www.yoursite.com/2006/newstory.html).  Finally, links must be HTML.  The Google News crawler does not crawl image links or links contained within javascript.

Now that the technical stuff is out of the way, are you ready to submit your site? Good.

[Open the Submission Form]

There are a few more things to keep in mind about Google News.  Articles are placed completely based on computer algorithms.  Human editors do not select front page articles or place articles into categories.  Google announced the ability to utilized sitemaps for news sites today, so take advantage of those abilities to help the crawler and the computer as much as possible.  This way you can exert the most control over your own content.

So how do stories get chosen for front page placement?  The Google News computers look at the total number of stories about a topic across the entire web.  The most popular stories are then selected to be featured on the front page.  In this way, Google News displays a snapshot of what all of the news sites across the globe are talking about on its front page.  So there's no trick or sneaky way to slip your story on to the front page.  Sorry.

For more information on Google News, and for help with Google News issues, check out the Publisher Help page.