Google News is one of the most important aggregators on the web. Philipp Lenssen’s kindly provided a useful summary of what’s known (and not) about it… The excellent 
Google Blogoscoped gives an overview of what is known (outside of Google) about how the Google News service works (which is sketchy, but fascinating to search engine and media watchers alike).
An increasing number of websites are including original news these days. It can provide a good extra service for customers and bring search engine ranking benefits at the same time by making the site more relevant to its theme and providing a useful, legitimate way of keeping its content fresh.
Check out Mr Lenssen’s post (and the comments) for the full details. Here are my highlights / observations:
- Human editor “first choice”: selection as a Google News source is down to a human editor’s choice rather than an algorithm in the first place.
- Mystery: there’s plenty of speculation about how you can get your stories on the front page of Google News, but no one outside of Google is sure how they get there… and no one knows how many news sites it actually indexes.
- Best to be breaking: if your site breaks news then it will stay at the head of the cluster of news stories on Google News - as Philipp notes, “The cool thing about this is that in Google News, even a smaller indexed blog can compete with, say, CNN.”
- Look after your image(s): including an image with your article means that Google News may well include a thumbnail on the page - experience would suggest that links in a cluster with a thumbnail will attract more click-throughs, but again no one knows for sure…
- Blogs on Google News: Discussion in the comments suggests that Google News won’t accept blogs as news sources unless they have more than one author.
: : Bonus Google Blogoscoped link – speculation about new Google services that may (or may not) be launching soon!
