TLDR

Google's Search Advocate team discusses SEO best practices for news sites, focusing on content quality...

Daniel Waisberg and Cherry Prommawin, Google Search Advocates, recently gave helpful insights in a video on best practices for news websites.

Google wants to assist news organizations boost the exposure of their content and drive more traffic.

Here's what the Search Advocate team recommends for increasing your visibility on Search and News results.

Where Can I Find News on Google?

Waisberg and Prommawin begin the video by explaining how Google can feature news items.

They emphasized two crucial locations where Google News material can appear: Top Stories and the News tab.

The appearance of the Top Stories carousel, a search tool that displays relevant and high-quality news material, varies depending on the user's query, device, and location.

The News tab, as opposed to Google News, concentrates on news-related results.

They went on to discuss four common Search result factors that content creators can alter.

These include:

  • Text Results
  • Rich Results
  • Image Results
  • Video Results

The pair emphasized the significance of understanding one's audience when selecting where to direct one's efforts, with data analysis playing a critical role in this process.

SEO Strategies for News Websites

The Search Advocate team emphasized the significance of creating helpful, dependable information for humans, not search engines when delivering SEO suggestions for news websites.

Waisberg and Prommawin emphasized the importance of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) aspects in content prioritization.

According to Prommawin (emphasis mine):

"Experience demonstrates how much the content developer has firsthand or actual experience with the issue...

Expertise indicates the extent to which the content producer possesses the required knowledge or ability for the topic...

The extent to which the content author or the website is known as a go-to source for the issue...

The most important member of E-E-A-T is trust. A financial hoax will always be untrustworthy, even if the content writer is very skilled, expert, and authoritative.''

In terms of technical optimizations, Waisberg and Prommawin recommend leveraging structured data to provide publishing dates to help Google better understand when the item went online or was significantly modified.

Finally, they advise creating a website based on current news items and incorporating relevant photographs and videos.

Qualification for Google News

To appear in Top Stories or the News tab, publishers must meet Google News' eligibility standards.

High levels of E-E-A-T, a consistent history of producing news-related content, and adherence to Google News standards are among the factors.

Transparency is essential for these policies, which means providing clear information about the authors, publication, and publisher.

Outbound Links, Paywalls, and Other Issues

Waisberg and Prommawin emphasize the importance of separating paid placement from advertising and other promotional material.

If spammy, sponsored, or user-generated content links are left on a site without being tagged, Google's spam standards may be violated.

It is critical that Google can crawl and index content behind paywalls in order to make it searchable.

Using structured data to implement a metre, paywall, or login wall can assist Google in distinguishing paywalled content from cloaking.

Waisberg and Prommawin closed by inviting publishers to visit the Google News Initiative website to learn more about search success.

To keep up with the Google Update cycle for its search engine, Hocalwire CMS features a carefully curated collection of settings that are automatically updated. We provide mobile SEO implementation as part of our standard packages as a service to our clients. To learn how Hocalwire may assist in transforming your current codebase into a beautiful mobile experience, Schedule a Demo right away.