Often when you perform a search, Google will incorporate current relevant news stories within the search engine results pages under the heading ‘News For’.
For sites that carry any sort of news, these news results are an excellent opportunity to increase search visibility and traffic.
Back on Saturday, Sept. 22, 2012, Google News turned 10 years old. Like many other superstars who have spent too much time in the media spotlight, the news search engine needs to check itself into rehab and relook at its news settings.
Maybe then it can figure out why the number of unique visitors to Google News remained flat in the U.S. while Yahoo News has grown dramatically.
For many publishers, Google News is an important source of traffic. This is particularly true for publishers involved in the business of distributing news.
As a result, it’s no surprise that a Google SEO strategy for some publishers focuses heavily on Google News.
For those publishers, a new tag introduced by Google to help publishers surface their best content will be of interest.
Finding a genuine “scoop” of a story can be SEO gold. It can whizz round the internet gathering links as it goes. However when you have a story that is a little “too hot to handle” you need to careful how you manage it.
Recent events would make you believe that the traditional print media is a bit too cosy with the establishment and that if you want to publish a controversial article which will turn into juicy SEO link bait then the online world is for you.
However, my experience shows this is not necessarily the case and that if you have news which is “too hot to handle” then Google News might be your best bet.
In 2006, a Belgian newspaper group, Copiepresse, sued Google. It claimed that the search engine was violating its copyrights in showing headlines and excerpts from its newspapers in Google News.
Google lost in court, but it may have won a small moral victory when it left those same newspapers crying ‘Bloody Mary!‘ this week. The reason? They noticed that their websites were no longer appearing in Google search results.
If you could get your website content syndicated and ranking well on
Google News, it would be an awesome way to generate traffic, but how difficult is this?
We decided to explore what it takes to perform well in Google News by starting our own general news site from scratch (it’s a German site at www.noows.de) and it helped us learn a whole lot.
Few search experts doubt that social media will have some impact on the SERPs in the future, but up until now, it hasn’t been very clear that search engines like Google and Bing quite know the best way to integrate social content and signals into their algorithms and UIs.
But if several changes spotted in the wild on Google News results are any indication, they’re increasing their rates of experimentation.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network. It recently passed the
400m registered user mark and is now the a top five web property
according to comScore.
But Facebook is fast becoming more than just the world’s largest social
network. With 5bn pieces of content being shared every week, and a whopping
60m status updates being post each week, Facebook can no longer be
classified as a simple ‘social network‘.
Widgets have become pretty much ubiquitous on the web. Plenty of companies are using widgets as a low-cost distribution strategy: they offer their tools and services in a form that enables users to embed those tools and services into their own websites.
Now Google is getting into the act. It wants to widgetize your blog and website with its products and has launched Google Web Elements to do just that.
I spotted an interesting post on Soshable, which flagged up some data that shows how difficult it is for smaller publishers to break through to the Digg front page.
In the past week, according to data gathered by di66.net, the top ten sources featured on Digg are as follows: The Telegraph, The New York Times, YouTube, Time, Arstechnica, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Cracked, the blessed Daily Mail, and The Guardian. All big-ass publishers.
JD Rucker, who wrote the Soshable post, says Digg needs to diversify, unless it wants to die:When less than 1% of the sites submitted control 46% of the front page, diversity is dead.”
It’s the last thing newspapers need. You can almost hear the gnashing of teeth, the hair-pulling, and the calls in to legal.
Not now! Not Google!
But it’s true – Google’s longstanding policy of no advertising on the Google News site is becoming less policy than loose guideline. As John Battelle so aptly puts it, “sh*tstorm to follow.”
Google is now running contextual ads against Google News search results in the United States. Search for “Barack Obama” right about now and you’ll see ads for a Barack Obama watch, and a Barack Obama wall plaque. Search “recession” and you get pretty much what you’d expect — work-at-homes schemes and continuing education programs.