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.