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Adding a "Follow us on Google News" button to your website

Let readers follow your publication on Google News with one click by adding a call-to-action button to your article pages.

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Written by Support Newsifier

Introduction

Google News lets readers follow individual publishers. When a reader follows your publication, your articles start appearing in their personalised Following feed in the Google News app and on news.google.com, which is one of the most reliable ways to bring loyal readers back to your site.

To make that as easy as possible for your audience, Newsifier supports adding a "Follow us on Google News" call-to-action button directly on your website. The button links straight to your publication's page on Google News, so following you takes a single click.

What the button does

When a reader clicks the button, they are taken to your publication page on Google News, where they can confirm they want to follow you. From that moment on, your new articles are surfaced in their Following feed and are more likely to appear in their Google News recommendations.

How this differs from the Preferred Sources button

Both buttons help loyal readers see more of your content, but they work in different places:

  1. Follow us on Google News adds your publication to a reader's Following feed inside Google News.

  2. Add as a preferred source tells Google Search and Discover to show more of your articles in Top Stories and the Discover feed. You can read more about that in Adding a Google Preferred Sources button to your website.

They are independent of one another, so you can enable one or both.

What's included

The feature comes with two things you can decide:

  1. The button text — by default it reads "Follow us on Google News", automatically translated to your site's language, and we can replace that with any wording you prefer

  2. Flexible placement — the button can be positioned wherever it fits best in your article page layout, for example directly under the headline or at the end of the article

The styling of the button itself follows the standard component, so it stays consistent with the rest of your site and with future updates.

What you need before we can enable it

To link the button to the right place, we need your Google News publication ID. You can find it like this:

  1. Open news.google.com and search for your publication by name.

  2. Open your publication's page.

  3. Look at the address bar. The URL will look like https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBwgKMKq_lgsw44O2Aw. The part after /publications/ is your publication ID.

If your publication does not appear on Google News yet, you will first need to register it in Google Publisher Center. Let us know if you would like help with this — we are happy to look at it with you.

How to enable it

The "Follow us on Google News" button is an opt-in feature and is available to all Newsifier publishers at no additional cost. To add it to your site, contact Newsifier support with:

  1. Your Google News publication ID (or the link to your publication page on Google News)

  2. The button text you would like, or confirm that you want the default: "Follow us on Google News", automatically translated to your site's language

  3. The placement on your site where the button should appear

Our team will configure it for you and confirm once it is live.

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