Google News tips, tricks?
Don Day May 31st, 2008
Since my Twitter question got such a response, I have another open query. Has anyone come across a good guide to Google News optimization? My site does very well in the web results category, but we get creamed in news, despite our standing as the #1 local site in the market. I’m set up on site maps, and I’ve tried to optimize, but I’m frustrated by the lack of good actionable info online (what little there is seems to be targeted at poser news sites). Anyone have good ideas?
5 Comments Add your own
1. Anonymous | May 31st, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I think Google News puts more weight on authority as well as click generation. Google tracks clicks on headline titles (just as they do on page titles on the main website). From what I’ve read, they’re trying to emphasize major news sources more.
2. Rob | May 31st, 2008 at 6:53 pm
1. Google Sitemap through Webmaster Tools for SEO.
2. Google Analytics - Put tracking code at bottom of your homepage so you can track traffic to your site (I’d use this in addition to whatever Belo’s using, just a suggestion). One nice thing about this is you can see what keywords people are using to come to your site and adjust Meta Tags and also keep those keywords top of mind when writing headlines. Make sure your site doesn’t have some sort of ’spiderwall’ against search engines past your homepage.
3. It’s been a few weeks since I did it but I think I recall you can submit your site to both Google and Yahoo News.
4. Create a Google Toolbar button that links to your homepage and also when you click on it you can see the most recent posted stories on your site. This is a new fangled widget type deal you can build through toolbar.google.com … 21st Century version of ‘Make us your homepage’ but instead of having to go to the site you can just click on the button to see what headlines are on the site without actually going to the site. Might not help with News visibility but one more widget to help drive traffic to your site via Google.
5. I just did a news search for Boise and one of the first stories that popped up was from NWCN.com (cough). If they’re pulling AP content that’s one thing. If you’re pulling your story, see if they can get some reciprocal links going back to your site ‘for more information’ on every story they ‘copy’ from your site. What’s wierd about that story that popped up is that I typed in Boise and got the NWCN version of the missing teen story. I typed in boise missing teenager and your story was second and third in the list.
3. Danny Sanchez | May 31st, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Here’s a handy insider’s look that appeared on the Online Journalism Review blog a few weeks ago: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/080506niles-google-news/
The Google News folks have been doing all sorts of weird tinkering to their site lately. Frankly, because of the relatively small number of publishers included compared to the regular Google search, SEOs out there haven’t done too much digging into the nuances of Google News.
If you find any good resources, I’d love to hear about them.
4. Rick Ellis | May 31st, 2008 at 10:07 pm
I’ve actually started doing some work for sites who are trying to optimize their Google News placement. Here are a couple of things to tweak.
Keep in mind that Google News doesn’t revisit a url. For now, once they scrape it, that’s it. So if you’re updating a story (especially a local one with national implications), you’ll lose out if you’re simply updating the old story. Which explains why sometimes you can have a much better version of a local story, and no one sees it.
For instance, on Super Tuesday, I created a twitter feed with election results. I embedded the feed in a series of pages throughout the night as the race changed. Because the headline and url was always different, Google News saw each page as new. But because each page used the same Twitter feed, you got the same info no matter which link you followed.
Google News seems to grab stuff based on a series of assumptions about the site. Based on its history, it tracks how frequently the site is updated, how much content is original (versus wire content) and how many people click on the headline. Some of this you can tweak, but honestly, some of it is a the mercy of your users.
It’s also important to keep your headlines as literal as possible–particularly if you’re a smaller site. Google News seems to be a bit more forgiving if you’re one of their top tier sources. But smaller sites seem to need headlines that are much more obvious. I’m not sure of the reasoning, but that seems to be the case.
Google News will ignore pges without a fair amount of text on them. It’s not clear just what that threshold is. But if you find a lot of your smaller stories aren’t being grabbed, this is probably the issue.
Hope this helps a few poeple.
5. Anonymous | June 2nd, 2008 at 2:10 am
Not really. Google SOP.
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