It is pretty common in our industry to talk about about getting your news release to Google, Bing or Yahoo! but what does this actually mean?

First off, it’s important to note that no one (despite what you may be told) can guarantee very much when it comes to the search engines.  However, what we are capable of doing is studying the various methods for getting news releases into search engines and work with customers to provide them with the best opportunity to get the most traffic from the countless people using search engines to find news and information.

That being said, one of the keys to defining what it means to “get your news release to a search engine” involves distinguishing between the standard Web search engine and the news search engine.  The Web engine shows a wide variety of content – from images, to video, to news and more.  The Web engine is what most people use when they visit Bing, Google or Yahoo!

If your web site is already getting indexed by a search engine, then getting your news release into these engines can be as simple as uploading it onto your Web site where the search engine crawlers can get to it.   If you want to increase the likelihood that a search engine will pick-up your news release you can submit a sitemap file to the search engines that includes the URL of your news release.

However, just because a search engine finds and indexes your news release doesn’t necessarily mean anyone is going to see it.  Getting a news release into a search engine is the easy part – getting it into a search engine so people will see it is the tricky part.  This depends on a number of variables but essentially boils down to A) How you have constructed your news release and B) The authority of your site.  Best practices for news release optimization is a pretty big discussion that we’ll have to save for another day.

Moving on, the other type of search that matters for news releases is news search.  News search is a different section of Bing, Yahoo! and Google than the standard Web search engine.  Another key difference that only related to Yahoo! is that they not only provide an engine for retrieving news but they also generate original, editorial content.

When it comes to getting into news search, the search engines are more selective about determining what gets in.  They distinguish between certified “news sources,” that can include outlets like the AP and Reuters and news distribution services like PRWeb.  Content from these certified news sources will be indexed and retrieved when searches are run in the news search engines.  Even if you use a certified news source to carry your news release, there are still various factors that may prevent your particular news release from getting indexed.  Google, for example, has a list of news-specific crawl errors that may prevent your news release from getting into Google News.  However, once it does get in, your news release will be typically indexed for a 28-day period.

Filed under: Distribution, SEO, Visibility by Jiyan