Are you a news publisher? Does your site update frequently with new and relevant content? Well do I have good news for you! Google recently announced the Google News Publisher Center via the Google news blog.

Up until now, if you made any changes or additions to your site, Google wouldn’t know about it unless you re-fetched or waited for the crawlers to come around. This could be especially disappointing if you are a news site or blog because readers may not have seen your content. With the Google News Publisher Center not only will this be resolved, but you will be able to alter the classification of your content to better serve viewers.

The Google news blog announcement details the benefits:

“With the Publisher Center, you can benefit from better discovery and classification of your content and you can directly make the following changes:

• Update your news site details, including changing your site name and labeling your publication with any relevant source labels (e.g., “Blog”, “Satire” or “Opinion”)
• Update your section URLs when you change your site structure (e.g., when you add a new section such as http://example.com/2014commonwealthgames or http://example.com/elections2014)
• Label your sections with a specific topic (e.g., “Technology” or “Politics”)”

The announcement also states that it is currently available in the US market only, but they plan to add it to more countries soon and ask for feedback.

“At the moment the tool is only available to publishers in the U.S. but we plan to introduce it in other countries soon and add more features. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about what works well and what doesn’t. Ultimately, our goal is to make this a platform where news publishers and Google News can work together to provide readers with the best, most diverse news on the web.”

As long as you are verified in Webmaster Tools you need only ask for inclusion to Google News. Once complete you can take full advantage of the settings and benefits listed above. One tip; be sure to use the news keywords meta tag and frequently revisit to take full advantage of this opportunity.

Happy reporting!