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Google News Optimisation
Barry Adams
Polemic Digital
March 2017
How News Publishers
Dominate Search

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Barry Adams
 Doing SEO since 1998
 Founder of Polemic Digital
 Co-Chief at State of Digital

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My Approach to SEO
Three Pillars Model:
1. Technology: making your website
crawlable & indexable
2. Relevancy: optimising content for the
right keywords
3. Authority: links to improve trust &
rankings
Technology
Relevancy
Authority
The Three Pillars of SEO:

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Google News

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History of Google News
• 2002: initial beta
• 2006: official launch
• 2007: Universal Search
• 2015: Accelerated Mobile Pages

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±11.5% of Google search
results have a Google News
element

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‘Top Stories’ onebox

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Growth of Mobile

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Mobile News Carousels

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Mobile Publisher Carousels

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Google AMP is mandatory
No AMP
AMP

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Mobile News Visibility

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AMP Beyond News

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• ‘Proper’ news;
 Not a news section on commercial site
• Original content;
 Some syndication is fine
• Multiple updates a day;
 Actively updated site
• Multiple contributors;
 A colophon / authors list helps
• Editorial speciality;
 Niche news sites are welcome
• Technical requirements;
 News XML Sitemap
 Accelerated Mobile Pages

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Keeping Google News Clean

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Googlebot-News

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Optimising for
Google News

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Google News Ranking Factors
1. Editorial Speciality
If your news site is a specialist on a specific topic, you are more likely to rank in
Google News boxes for relevant queries.

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Google News Ranking Factors
2. Headline Keyword Matching
Having the keyword in your article headline is the single most important on-page
ranking factor.

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Google News Ranking Factors
3. Recent News
Google News prefers to show recently published or updated articles, so publish
often & update previous articles.

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Google News Ranking Factors
4. Content Factors
 NewsArticle Structured Data
 Headlines: max 110 chars
 Headlines: <H1>
 Articles: 80+ words
 Articles: not too long (?)
 No article fragmentation
 … many more

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?
Title Not Found

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Special characters are escaped and shown in ASCII code

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Article Fragmented
?

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The article content is not one continuous block in the source code – it is
interrupted by the ‘Read More’ block.

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http://www.stateofdigital.com/common-crawl-errors-google-news/

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Leveraging Google News
for regular SEO

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News sites dominate Google

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Why?
(Obligatory cat picture)

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Links, links, links, and more links

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News Sites = Trusted Sites
News articles are cited & linked to very often
News publishers become trusted sources
Published articles rank top in Google
Top ranked articles are read more

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Leveraging link power

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Topical Hub Pages

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Internal Link Power
Article Links Article Tags

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The Key to Publisher’s Search Domination
• News sites don’t need to build links
 Their stories gather links with minimal effort
• Internal link power is sent to topical hub pages
 Through in-article links and article tags
• These topic ages then rank in ‘regular’ organic search
 Any new article published on the topic gets instant link value
from the hub page

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TheSun.co.uk
Paywall

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TheGuardian.com
Migration

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The Sun vs Daily Mail

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Summarised

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Google News Domination
• ±11.5% of searches have a Google News element
• News publishers can leverage internal link power
• AMP is starting to dominate mobile SERPs
• Technical SEO is very important for news publishers

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Thank You
barry@polemicdigital.com
www.polemicdigital.com
@polemicdigital
@badams