There has been recent interest in how a site can be included into Google News. Ben covered a thread at DigitalPoint Forums a few weeks ago on the topic. I thought I would revisit it with my own personal experience on how I was accepted into Google News.

(1) It took me a long time to get included. I was rejected a couple times prior and I had to make a good case for me to be included.

(2) Technical requirements:

• In order for the Google crawler to correctly gather articles, each page that displays an article's full text needs to have a unique URL that does not change. Google cannot include sites in Google News that display multiple articles at the same URL.

• The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits.

• Keep in mind that Google cannot include sites for which the URL of the main page includes a date. URLs with dates in them often change on a daily or weekly basis. This prevents Google from crawling the site for new content, as Google is unable to detect the most current URL to be crawled.

• Google's automated crawler is currently best able to crawl regular HTML links. Google is unable to crawl image links or links embedded in JavaScript.
  

(3) Making your case:

• Provide a good historical background of the site
  
• Show awards the site received
  
• Give stats on the site
  
• Tell them about your editors and authors
  
• Tell them about who links to your site (if the Google blog links to you, that is a good thing)
  
• Make sure you are news related or mostly news related.
  
• Make sure your site complies with the technical requirements, and show them that is does.
  

Forum discussion continued at Search Engine Watch Forums.