SEO best practices for News sites, Google’s advice

What techniques and interventions are useful for increasing the organic visibility of a news Web site? It is from this question, simple only on the surface, that the new episode of Search Central Lightning Talks (formerly Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks), the abbreviated but information-packed conference-style video talks with which the Google Search team shares valuable insights for those who manage websites and seek the road to success. And so, Search Advocates Daniel Waisberg and Cherry Prommawin walk us through best practices for news sites to improve rankings and attract more traffic to the pages of our publishing project.

Where and how news appears on Google

“We start by clarifying the different ways news content can appear on Google,” Cherry Prommawin says in the video’s opening: Google Search shows news as text, Image, video or other types of results, and there are then “two key places” where Google News content can appear in Search, namely the Top Stories, and the News tab.

He goes into more detail with Waisberg, who lists the 4 common types of search result elements over which publishers have some influence.

1. Text results based on the text on the page.
2. Multimedia results with one or more attributes with additional information about the page, such as FAQs or practical how-to type steps.
3. Image results based on an image embedded on a page.
4. Video results based on a video embedded on a page.

The best way to decide on which type to direct our efforts is to “figure out what works best for the target audience,” says the Search Advocate, which also suggests checking the information we get from Google Search Console data on page performance.

To complete the picture, as mentioned, there are then two other spaces that are particularly relevant to news outlets, and Prommawin reminds us that access to these two features is reserved for sites that are found to be eligible for Google News, which is Google’s celebrated news aggregation service, available on Android, iOS and via the Web at news.google.com, which displays various content information, such as headlines and personalized suggestions.

1. Top Stories Carousel, a Search feature that displays relevant, high-quality news content. The layout of the carousel can change based on many factors, such as user query, device, and location.
2. News tab on Google Search, narrowed Search results to focus only on news-related content.

It is important to note that these two features are different from Google News.

SEO best practices for news websites

Let’s finally get into the meat of the topic with recommendations and pointers for optimizing news websites and leading them to improve visibility and returns on Google.

The first reference point mentioned in the video is Google’s classic SEO guidelines, now called Google Search Essentials, which include key information on what makes web content suitable for appearing and performing well on Google Search.

Narrowing the analysis to best practices relevant to news websites, Waisberg begins by reminding us that Google’s systems are designed to present content that is useful, trustworthy, and created primarily for people and not for search engines, as enshrined in the recent Helpful Content system – and there is a list of questions that can help us evaluate our content in these three areas.

After identifying relevant content, Google’s systems rank it, i.e., decide the priority with which to show it, using a mix of factors that can help define which content demonstrates aspects of experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness, which we commonly call EEAT.

The value of EEAT for newspaper titles

Usually, editorial newspapers have good EEAT values, but it is worth going into some detail about the elements that make up these concepts.

• Experience shows the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic. For example, if we are looking for product reviews, we probably want to read content created by people who have used the product or who may have experience in that subject.
• Expertise shows the extent to which the content creator has the knowledge or skills for the topic. For example, if we are looking for health advice, we probably want to read content written by doctors or researchers.
• Authoritativeness shows the extent to which the content creator or Web site is recognized as a reference source for the topic. For example, if we are looking to renew your passport, the official page of the referring agency will be the most authoritative source for this content.
• Trustworthyness is the most important component of EEAT: even if the content creator is highly experienced, knowledgeable, and authoritative, a financial scam will always be unreliable.

The other practical interventions

So it is Prommawin again who brings the discussion back to somewhat more practical aspects, pointing out some operational insights for optimizing news content.

For example, it is useful to provide Google with a publication date by following the instructions on this provided by the search engine’s official documentation; in this way, we can help Google identify when a page has been published or significantly updated. With structured data, in particular, we can specify a date and time zone and enable the crawler to better understand the dates of our articles; when a news page receives a significant update, we can change the date of the article and assign some appropriate labels to the dates with text such as “Published,” “Published,” “Updated,” or “Last Updated,” also using the dateModified field of structured data for this purpose.

As a general advice, then, we should minimize the presence of other dates on the page: for example, if we show related stories at the bottom of the article, it would be better if the relevant dates do not appear to avoid possible confusion when selecting the date to be displayed in search results.

The structure of the website can also be important, especially for evolving news stories, as in the case of the Olympic Games or political elections. Some sites use the same page for several story updates, while others publish multiple pages for the same story-Google has no preference in this regard, but there are some good suggestions for handling these situations.

If we use a single page to tell all the updates to a story, we should provide the dates with the time zone and follow the guidelines on dates above, and avoid updating a story without adding significant information.

If, on the other hand, we choose to create multiple pages for all subsequent developments of a story, it is important to make sure that the pages are linked together effectively and contain a timestamp or publication dates. One solution may be to create a hub page for the main story and link from there to each new piece.

Last, but not least, images and videos are an important part of news content: images should be relevant to the topic to the article, avoiding using overly large logos or watermarks that basically hide the content and make the images difficult to understand; also, rather than embedding important information in images, it is more appropriate to make that information accessible and scannable in text format as well.

Suitability for Google News, tips for getting in the results

As mentioned-and as we really should already know-in order to appear in the Main News or News tab, publishers must meet some specific Google News eligibility criteria. Compared to a few years ago, the “good news” is that online content is automatically considered for these sections (no more need to make a request and wait for the verdict), and to appear in Google News an article must meet three basic criteria:

• Possess and display high levels of EEAT.
• Possess a consistent history of producing news-related content.
• Follow Google News policies.

On the latter front, policies rely heavily on transparency of information provided about authors, publications, and editorial team. Site visitors want to know who writes the content they are reading, Waisberg summarizes.

Google News policies on advertising and promotional materials

Prommawin addressed some specific aspects of Google News policies, particularly with regard to advertising and other types of promotional materials, which first and foremost must not exceed in quantity the content represented by news and must be clearly distinguishable from regular articles, thus clarifying what paid placements are.

Moreover, even when thinking in terms of monetization, we must not forget and neglect the user experience: this means, for example, avoiding having excessive pop-ups or ads, which could annoy readers or slow down pages.

If we then host outbound links from content, it might be useful to “communicate to Google the relationship with the linked pages,” says Search Advocate again, which then suggests using rel values of link attributes such as sponsored or UGC-not least because, otherwise, not properly labeling links on our site that are “spam, paid or user-generated” could lead to a violation of Google’s anti-spam rules.

Continuing with the basic rules, if we decide to implement a counter, paywall, or login wall we must take care to use the appropriate structured data, so as to help Google differentiate paywall-protected content from cloaking, another well-known violation of the search engine’s antispam policy, included among the so-called black hat tactics. Finally, to make pages effectively searchable on Google, it is critical that Googlebot can crawl and index the content behind paywalls.