celticfc.com getting next to no traffic from Google News

Question

Hi,
I'm fairly new to the team at Celtic Football Club and something I can't get my head round is why there is such low traffic from Google News.
This is the total number of clicks and impressions that the site has received in the past 3 months.

With Celtic having the global fan-base that it does, the site has had over 29 million impressions (from Google Search Console) in the same time-frame, so the fact that it has only received 56 clicks from Google News is pretty baffling.
We have a full-time editorial team who are the main source of the most important Celtic FC news so I had expected Google to be keen to include the site's content on there.
With all that being said, I'm happy to take the blame if there's anything that's obviously wrong with the current technical set-up of the News feed https://celticfc.com/news and the articles on there.
I've tried to tick off all the main technical requirements including most recently adding a new Google News sitemap and adding an updated date format. The only thing I can see that we don't have are author bios or specific pages for the authors (but for various reasons that would be a big job to sort out just now). If anyone thought that those would be the dealbreaker I could probably push for them.
I'm also told from someone with far more technical skills than me that celticfc.com has quite a strange set-up with where the content appears on the page, the site content doesn't appear at all when Javascript is turned off, and that his Screaming Frog crawler was actually blocked from crawling the site originally. I wasn't sure if any of these issues would prevent the site from appearing on Google News though.
Can anyone help with any new suggestions? Any help would be great.
Thanks,
Jonathan

Chris_Andrews · Accepted Answer

Hi Jonathan, 
I'll throw my two cents in here as well :) 
The javascript is probably not an issue but would be worth fixing. Google can crawl and render the javascript okay as long as access to the scripts isn't blocked. I would just fix it because there's no reason to hide the content as far as I can tell and Google does want the page to reflect what has been crawled (though most readers will have javascript turned on, so not a major issue). 
That Screaming Spider is/was blocked is fine too. That would not indicate that Googlebot is blocked, and obviously it's not. A lot of sites block Screaming Spider just to prevent other people from crawling and investigating their site. 
Authorship... I wouldn't say that's - the - cause of not ranking well. But it can play a role in the evaluation of EEAT. Of course, EEAT is not a direct ranking factor itself... but items that strengthen EEAT related factors strengthen a site's reputation in Google. 
All that said, I would highly recommend good on-article author bios with links to their (appropriate) social media. You want to give Google a good reference so that it can understand who these authors are and where else they might appear online so that they can have their own reputations separate from the site. But don't expect an immediate jump in rankings just because you added them. It's just a bump in your reputation over time. 
And of course, you want your site to have strong information about who/what it is as well. 
Here's an interesting factor though - you are reporting on own organization. That means your articles are self promotional of course. You aren't going to post negative criticism of your organization (not if you want to keep your job!). 
It used to be that Google News wouldn't accept sites reporting on their own selves. 
Now it's not so tightly restricted
But does Google News evaluate your content differently that an unbiased news source, and perhaps rank the unbiased stories higher? Perhaps, it's hard to say for sure, but that seems like that would be reasonable. 
At the same time, perhaps your site breaks news about your organization, perhaps a trade or something, before anyone else. Then it would be fitting for your news to rank higher. 
There can be a lot of nuances with news and news rankings. I think Google News is still working on figuring all that out. It's far from perfect and often seems inconsistent in many ways.
Do know that the Publisher Center, and ranking on the Google News home/sections/search-results pages, are two different things. Being approved in the Publisher Center does not make a site rank, and having an rss feed in the Publisher Center just controls which articles are listed in your Publisher Center, but doesn't affect what articles may or may not be included (ranked) in Google News.
The news sitemap doesn't hurt anything, but I'm not sure it really helps much either. We all use it and recommend it just because that's what's always been done and Google News still includes it in their documentation.
I would just recommend strengthening your site's reputation with strong transparency (authors/site info), writing the best stories you can, making your stories as relevant and useful to readers as possible, and keeping an eye out for any issues being reported in your Search Console, and then letting the chips fall where they may. If your site is already ranking in Google News, it can be really difficult to quickly influence Google News rankings, it just builds over time as you provide great content, have a strong reputation, and gain in popularity overall, 
Chris