Google has responded to frequent speculation by news authors about how the service ranks news items for importance, and how timing, and the use of images affects the chances of being featured.

This unusually open response from the search giant differs from their one-size-fits-all response of “It’s all in the algorithm” they tend to dish-out to hapless webmasters who dare to question thier ranking, and offers a much greater insight to popular news authors who wonder why an article wasn’t featured.

In a recent announcement, Google’s Andy Golding offered the following nuggets of insider mythbusting…

Having an image next to your article improves your ranking Myth

“While having a good image with your article does improve your chance to get your picture shown, it has no impact on the ranking of the article itself. There are some tips in our help center designed to help us include more of your images in Google News. We encourage you to check those out if you have had problems getting images included in the past.”

Updating an article after posting causes problems with Google News True

“Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we’ve crawled it, they won’t be reflected on our site. We hope that soon we’ll have the ability to re-crawl your articles to make sure we have the latest version displayed on our site, but for now this is not the case.”

Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking Myth

“Google News is constantly looking for the most recent developments in a story. Making sure we get the latest, breaking news articles is very important. However, whether you publish before, after, or in the midst of when other publishers post articles won’t affect your article ranking. Our algorithms take a number of factors into account when choosing the best articles in a cluster. Simply publishing the same story after another publisher won’t help. Additionally, our system is set up to detect duplicate content and promote the original source of a story. If we detect that a source is constantly rewriting stories in order to game the system, we will flag the source in our system.”

There are more myths busted on the article itself, which is a worthwhile read for any news author aspiring to hit the lofty heights of Google News, so head on over for the full list of facts.