Not accepted in Google news.

[Tit]

Hallo,

Our website was not accepted by Google news although we are confident that our site meets all the requirements.

We see several other gambling sites already appearing within Google News’ pages, and we contend that, in most cases, our reporting is both timelier and more relevant.

We hope you can give us any feedback.

http://www.hetpokerspel.nl/nieuws

Regards,

Thijs Weinands

[zeepartner]

yup, the site doesn't look too bad. but i have some experience with trying to get gambling sites into G-News and despite of good and frequently updated content we couldn't get into it. I think poker is probably the most difficult segment to get accepted here!

the following thing strike me as possible problems:

1. frequency: you publish an article every other day. in my opinion you should have at least 1-2 articles per day to get a significant frequency
2. length: all articles seem to be between 200-250 words. that doesn't have to be a huge problem, but could be as they hardly ever seem to be longer than that
3. links from articles: you often link to commercial pages such as "xx dollar freeroll" and "xx dollar bonus" and "online poker". the random articles i checked all contained one ore more such links. these phrases are clearly commercial and i think you're overdoing the optimization here a bit. that's definitely not a quality signal for news, which should at least appear to be objective and not directly commercial...
4. backlinks: almost all your backlinks come from gambling related sites. this might be good because they are topically related. but it would definitely help to have at least a few backlinks from authority sites, preferably other news sources that are themselves indexed in G-news.

as a first quick fix, i guess i would start with point 3 and put less "commercial" links into your news articles. maybe if you start publishing an article per day that might also help.

[zeepartner]

oh, and consider creating a specific XML news sitemap if you don't have one already (i only found a standard XML sitemap)

[JamesNorquay]

Thing is some times Google has blocks on specific sites, I have noticed this with sports betting and gaming sites in the past. Sites may be accepted a few years ago.

Also from my experience you need very high quality content and you need to be producing content at a fast rate.

A good post from the SEOmoz blog can be found here, about getting into Google news:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-seomoz-gained-1000s-of-visits-from-google-news