Why did Google reject us from Google News?

[styleblueprint]

I submitted our site, http://www.styleblueprint.com to Google to pontentially be a local news source in Nashville.  I received the following note back:

We reviewed your site and are unable to include it in Google News at this
time. We have certain guidelines in place regarding the quality of sites
which are included in the Google News index. Please feel free to review
these guidelines at the following link:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3

Clicking the link, it anchors to the section that says:

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. etc...

Now we have never intentionally tried to do anything deceptive for our rankings.  I am new to SEOmoz and new to SEO optimization in general.  I am working through the errors report on our campaign site but I cannot tell what they are dinging us for. Whatever it is we will be happy to fix it.

All thoughts greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance, Jay

[KeriMorgret]

I didn't do an in-depth check of your site, but as long as you're still getting your Google organic traffic I think you're fine. It is hard to get into news, and the appearance of the site really shouts blog and not news site.

If you haven't already, it's always a good idea to verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools. If you have some type of problem with your site, you'll often get a notice there. There's also lots of interesting tidbits of information you can find in that account that you can't see if you're not verified (more information about incoming links, for example).

[styleblueprint]

Fair enough, but they are publishing long articles 5 days a week.  I wish there was another term besides "blog" for it but cest la vie.  My biggest worry is they indicated we were a bad actor in the email response.

[KeriMorgret]

Your site looks more like a blog and less like a news site. In the Google News Forum Publisher FAQ (http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151309) Google has the following:

Can I suggest my personal website for inclusion in Google News?
At the moment, Google News tends not to include articles from personal websites and blogs.

That would be my guess is that it looks like a (very nice) blog about the area, but not necessarily a news site.

[styleblueprint]

I am okay if we don't make it in - I just don't want to be doing something wrong from a SEO standpoint.  Thank, this is good info.

[JamesNorquay]

From my expeirence getting into Google news is not easy.

Some key factors include

• Original content 350+ characters long (multiple versions each week, even daily content)

*Multiple authors of the content.

*Proper attribution (Is the site correctly set up for Google news)

*Response time

*Having a Google news site map.

*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.

I hope this helps.