As I write this, I’m testing out the new Google Publisher Center, so please bear with me!
What is Google Publisher Center?
Earlier today I received an email from the Google Webmaster Blog, informing me of this newly available tool. It looks really interesting and could potentially have a big impact when it comes to search engine optimisation. Maybe it won’t, but from what I’ve read this could be a big thing.
This tool replaces two existing tools; Google News Producer and Google News Publisher Center, which are mainly designed for publishing news content. But what is defined as news these days? Current affairs like you might find on TV and radio, or industry-specific news, views, blogs and so on?
Anyway, I’m going to try this out and see what happens!
Our portfolio is more business websites, so having never dealt with ‘news’ websites before, I never found a use for the previous tools. However, I got thinking about this tool and how it could maybe benefit my clients, so I thought I’d give it a try.
I’ve just done a quick test setup, here’s what I did.
First off, I had to set up an account. Once that was set up and everything verified, I followed the steps to try to discover what this tool actually does. From what I could work out, it’s a way of ensuring your news content gets published on the the Google News App.
You’ll be familiar with this more when using a smartphone and using the Google Search app. You’ll have noticed that below the search box, it displays a range of different news articles from sites such as BBC News, popular online newspapers and the like.
So, if you’ve got a website on which you publish ‘news’ type articles then give it a whirl.