Follow the best practices below to make sure your content continues to appear in Google News in the event of site redesigns or Protocol changes.
Site redesigns
If your publication is working on a site redesign, keep these points in mind during this process:
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Our team doesn't assist with SEO consulting or crawl tests.
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If your redesign involves changing the domain of your site, review our article on changing site domain.
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If your redesign involves changing your site structure, update our record of your content labels and associated labels within the Publisher Center once the change is live. Also update your News sitemap, if you have one.
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Review our technical requirements so the layout and format of your site is easy for our crawler to read.
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Minimize the number of redirects needed to follow a link from one page to another.
We recommend you consult the site management section of the Search Console Help Center for more tips.
Crawl HTTPS version of your site
HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) allows your users to navigate your site more securely, protecting the integrity and confidentiality of their data. We encourage you to adopt HTTPS to protect your users' connection to your website. Learn more about HTTPS.
For Google News to crawl your HTTPS content, publish your articles on HTTPS URLs. We recommend you redirect your HTTP URLs to HTTPS URLs. Typically, you don't need to specify HTTPS URLs in the Google News Publisher Center. We'll crawl your articles over HTTPS (when available) even if your site and section URLs were provided in HTTP.
HTTPS use with Google News Sitemap
The protocol you use in your sitemap should match the protocol of your site URL in the Publisher Center. For example, if the URLs in your sitemap start with “https://,” the URL listed in the Publisher Center should also start with “https://”). If you need to change the protocol of your site URL to make it consistent with your sitemap, you can update it in the “General” tab of the Publisher Center.