Google Publisher Center

Google’s Publisher Center allows digital publishers and marketing strategists to submit content to Google News and then manage it. Publishers do this by defining details about their site — RSS feeds, URLs and videos — and can do this for multiple publications in a single account.

Google created Publisher Center by merging Google News Producer and Google News Publisher Center. Google News Producer allowed publishers to create a branded feed of existing content and also serve ads. Google News Publisher Center allowed eligible items in the feed to show up in Google News results.

Publisher Center was launched in 2019 as Google ended its requirement that publishers apply for inclusion within Google News SERPs. Appearance is now determined by the same algorithm used for Google Search.

2.8.2 Does Google Publisher Center Matter for SEO?

The answer to this is more complex than it might seem at first glance.

Google has said Publisher Center’s purpose is to help manage content that’s eligible for Google News surfaces — news.google.com, the news tab of Google Search and the Google News iOS and Android apps — while the algorithm determines whether an article appears or ranks on these surfaces.

So, does that mean Publisher Center has no effect on Google News rankings? Well, not quite.

The issue is that Google has also said that using Publisher Center to define details about your site will make it easier to “index your site”. This means that while you could wait for Google News to crawl your site to find your new story, or update and ping your sitemap to tell the search engine about said piece, Publisher Center offers a more direct way to tell Google News when you’ve published a story.