Following the extremely helpful interview with Google’s Maile Ohye last week, we have put together a summary of top tips for optimising your site within Google News:
Google News SEO Tips
In order to gain decent Google News listings it is vital for your news site/blog/portal to be structured in such a way as to have what Google refers to as a ‘strong news ecosystem’.
To understand how and why a strong news ecosystem is determined we must first identify the ranking factors of Google News search.
Crawling: How Google Gathers News
Googlebot crawls a news site and then retrieves articles in two ways; through Google’s discovery crawl – where Google sees new URLs and then crawls those articles; and through created news sitemaps – a way for bloggers/ editors to list exactly what their new URLs are.
By creating a Robots.txt file or http headers you can notify Google of exactly what docs you want crawled and those that you want excluded from search results.
Grouping
Google News groups articles in sections so keywords are important in terms of getting the article grouped into the section by which it will receive most relevant clicks.
News Search Article Ranking
Story Ranking: How important do editors think the story is? This determines which stories warrant the most exposure. Story clusters are ranked according to aggregate editorial interest, which determines how widely received a story will be e.g. a local new story will obviously not be as highly ranked by Google News as a Michael Jackson story.
Article Ranking Within a Cluster
Google determines the ranking positions of stories within a cluster of stories. There are many signals that go into article ranking, the four major factors are:
i) Fresh and New: it’s important for an article to contain recent and objective information about a news story. Press Releases, satire and op-ed (an article giving the personal opinion of a named writer) are not eligible to lead clusters.
ii) Duplication and Novelty Detection: giving credit to original content will improve listings. Google call this Citation Ranking – if a story cites the original source then that will thus improve its ranking.
iii) Local/Personal Relevancy: more credit is given to stories within a cluster that have come from local sources.
iv) Trusted Sources: this is not an arbitrary Google decision but a data-driven decision. If more people click on a particular site/blog for a certain news category then the trust ranking will build up over time. E.g. a sports site may be trusted for sports news, but not for business news. Or the Financial Times will be trusted for business information in the UK but maybe not in New York.
Now we know exactly how Google News goes about ranking an article and/or site/blog, we can look at the benefits of implementing such protocols as News Sitemaps.
Benefits of Using News Sitemaps
Implementing News Sitemaps provides greater control over which articles appear on Google News as they help compliment Google’s discovery crawl. They help notify search engines which articles are new and should be crawled.
Sitemaps also provide Google with Meta information regarding your articles: instead of just relying on Google’s extractor, Sitemaps can notify Google of the publication date and also keywords that will help the search engine categorise and group your stories.
How to Optimise Multimedia Content
Video:
You can create a YouTube channel and submit that to Google – although Google are looking to include other video hosts, they trust YouTube as a reliable platform so optimising video is best via YouTube.
When using YouTube, including textual descriptions and transcripts is also helpful as that helps Google associate the video with the relevant subject matter.
Images:
Tips to get your images included in the news search:
1) Large images with good aspect ratio.
2) Descriptive captions and alt text.
3) Put the image near the title so Google will associate the image with the subject matter.
4) Make sure the image is inline and not a clickable version.
5) Always use JPEG images – much preferred by Google.
Is PageRank Important In Google News Searches?
PageRank is a lesser factor in Google News than web search, which is obvious as the linking structure for an article published minutes ago isn’t going to be as high as one published months ago. Therefore PageRank is used more delicately in Google News. Timeliness, local relevancy and the signals discussed above are more relevant than PageRank for Google News search.
Best Practices When Publishing Articles
1) It is important to create permanent unique URLs with at least three digits which will tell Google that the page is an article and not a static HTML page. If you don’t have three digits in your URL, you can work around this by implementing a news sitemap.
2) Don’t break up the article body. Paragraphs should be sequential and should not be broken down with user comments or links to related posts.
3) Put dates between the title and body text to help date extractor have correct dates.
4) Good title – HTML and article title needs to be indicative of the story.
5) Separate original content from press releases.
6) Create unique and informative content – the more unique, the better the listing.
By following these guidelines, it will improve your Google News listings and also build up the trust value and PageRank for your site over time.
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