Now that site speed is officially a Google ranking factor, site performance and page load time are important for SEO as well as usability. So how well do major news sites perform in these areas?

To get a basic idea I ran Page Speed, the open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that Google recommends, on the home page of 25 news sites.

The sites include a mix of major newspapers, news magazines and TV news sites. I started with the group I used in my news sites domain authority post and added a few more. It is mostly US-focused but five UK sites have also been included.

Keep in mind that Page Speed analyzes page performance against a series of “rules” that are known to speed up load time. Scores are on a scale of 100 with a high score being good. (This can cause confusion as some users equate a high number with longer load time, but in fact the opposite is true).

So which news sites fared best?

The Wall Street Journal leads the group by a considerable margin and The Los Angeles Times has the unfortunate honor of coming in last (though not by much).

UPDATE: After Mike’s comment below I added Yahoo! News, which scored well and took second place.

One thing to note is that Page Speed scores fluctuate a little each time you run it. I double-checked several pages; some scores remained the same but others changed by 1 or 2 points.

To take the comparison a step further, I also ran Page Speed on the top 10 sites’ lead article. Home pages will rank well for branded searches regardless of site speed, so it is at the content level that the scores matter more.

The Wall Street Journal still had the best score, but the UK’s Mail Online jumped up to tie it. Interestingly three of the five UK sites made the top 10.

UPDATE: Adding Yahoo! News moved it to the top of the group for articles and knocked Guardian.co.uk out of the top 10.

So how important is site speed?

Both the official announcement and Matt Cutts’ follow-up post emphasize the fact that site speed is just one of 200+ ranking factors and signals like relevance and reputation continue to carry much more weight. In addition site speed is impacting only a small number of queries at this time.

So you don’t need to drop everything and make site performance your #1 priority, but it is something to be mindful of. And since it is good for both SEO and usability, why wouldn’t you want to get it dialed in? At a minimum you should monitor the Site Performance data in your Webmaster Tools account and make an effort to minimize your average load times.

How can you improve site speed? Going back to the news site Page Speed scores, here are the highlighted issues for the best and worst performing sites:

As you can see there are plenty of ways to make improvements.

Related posts:

1. 20+ Major News Sites Ranked by Domain Authority
2. Yahoo Adds Enhanced News Results to SearchMonkey
3. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement

The major search engines are making real-time search a priority, resulting in good visibility opportunities for news sites especially for breaking news. Google, Bing and Yahoo are all experimenting with various forms of real-time results now and making deals with Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. So how can news sites maximize their real-time search visibility?

It should be noted that there many forms of real-time search, including Twitter Search itself and sites like OneRiot, Collecta and Topsy, among others. But in this post I am focusing on real-time results in the major search engines.

First, a quick look at how news content is currently being included in real-time search results.

In its “Latest results” Google blends results from Google News and Google Blog Search with updates from Twitter and Facebook Pages, offering multiple paths in for news and content sites.

For example as news was breaking on the Chile earthquake a couple weeks ago, The New York Times created a Twitter List to pull together the latest information from a variety of sources. The Chile Earthquake list was shared quite a bit on Twitter, causing it to appear frequently in real-time search results.

As this was happening, the real-time results for “earthquake in Chile” (at the time of this screen grab) included both the actual breaking news article and a retweet of @nytimes announcing the List, creating a double impression:

Editorial content is even more prominent on Bing Twitter, where the “Top links shared in Tweets” get a dedicated place on the page and remain there for longer periods of time. To-date the top links for many queries tend to be news sites as seen in this example for “NCAA tournament”:

In this particular case The New York Times was not included in the top links section but it did appear in the regular tweet stream. The fact that Bing identifies the source of any shortened URL helps credible news sources to stand out, particularly in the top links section where the domain for each link is referenced four times.

The opportunity is more limited on Yahoo, with real-time results limited to two tweets featured in the Twitter tab of the “Latest News” box:

However links to news content are often included in the highlighted tweets and Yahoo plans to incorporate more real-time content soon.

Real-time Search Optimization

As can be seen, news sites have some real advantages in competing for real-time search visibility particularly in Google and Bing. News organizations can quickly gain multiple listings and sustain them for a period of time through user retweets. This combined with the fact that well-known, trusted sources stand out from the clutter increases the likelihood of getting clicks.

So what can news sites do to maximize their visibility in real-time search?

• Monitor hot topics and trends to understand what users are searching for and talking about




• Add keyword support to tweets and updates and utilize hashtags




• Coordinate content promotion activities, timing tweets and Facebook Page updates for shortly after articles and blog posts are indexed in Google News or Google Blog Search




• Mobilize fans and followers through active engagement to foster an influx of tweets, shares and links to content, particularly from authoritative users. This helps to keep the content in the real-time stream and to establish it as a top shared link




• Act quickly – real-time search opportunities don’t stick around for long

These steps are pretty straightforward but the nature of real-time search also creates challenges. Here are some additional things to keep in mind:

• True real-time results happen in the moment and are fleeting, so it is difficult to sustain visibility. I had difficulty keeping up just to grab screenshots for this post (fortunately both Google and Bing have a “pause” button)




• The engines are still in a testing and experimentation phase, so real-time is not being strongly promoted yet and many users are not even aware it exists




• A recent eye tracking study from Oneupweb showed that user engagement with real-time search results is still limited, although it fared better with users looking for news content




• In terms of tracking there is not currently a simple way to separate real-time referrals from other Google, Bing or Yahoo search referrals. Tom Critchlow of Distilled offered some potential workarounds in a recent SEOMoz post, but it’s not an easy process right now. Tracking data from URL shorteners like Bit.ly can help to paint a clearer picture

If you have any additional tips or observations, I’d love to learn them. What are you doing to increase the real-time search visibility of your content?

UPDATE:
Some new developments: Google is now including “Top Links” with its real-time results and is allowing users to zoom in and “replay” tweets from specific dates and times. And Bing is experimenting with blending Twitter results into its main Web results.

Related posts:

1. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
2. Google News Optimization Tips
3. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends

Ever notice all the tags that some blogs add to their posts? Adding a few meaningful tags is fine, but news sites in particular have a habit of taking this practice much too far.

The Huffington Post is a good high-profile example:

Looking at recent posts they appear to have dialed tagging back a bit, but the average post still gets quite a few tags.

Unfortunately The Huffington Post’s success with search engine visibility has created a “HuffPo effect” in which other news organizations try to copy their blog formula. More than one news site has specifically asked me if adding this block of tag links to the top of posts is good for SEO.

Back in the day making the most of Technorati tags was a blog optimization best practice because it helped to increase visibility on that site. But that’s no longer a significant opportunity, so blog tags are now more about on-site usability; directing users to additional content on a particular topic or allowing them to subscribe to topic-specific RSS feeds.

To be clear, I’m not saying that blog tags have no SEO purpose or value. Tags or categories can be used to help organize content into topical silos and give users and crawlers easy access to posts, and sometimes well-optimized tag pages even rank well. But search engines don’t need 10+ different paths to the same content, and over-linking to a vast number of tag pages makes poor use of a site’s of internal link structure.

Tag pages that include the full text of posts can also create duplicate content issues (including only links and excerpts is the better approach). This is compounded by the fact that most news sites don’t establish tagging rules, so the editorial staff ends up creating lots of tags that are nearly the same and/or a large number of tag pages with hardly any posts on them.

At that point over-tagging harms usability too. Users don’t want to sort through piles of tags to find what they’re looking for, and they don’t want to click through to a tag page to find nothing there but the post they’d just read.

So use tags, but use them wisely.

In a recent Google Webmaster Central video Google’s Matt Cutts talked about blog tags and SEO:

“There are certainly some blogs, including some really popular blogs, who have an entire paragraph full of tags. And they have clearly spent a lot of time, almost as many minutes writing the tags out as they have the actual content to the post. And I always laugh at that because it’s really not that needed.”

Do yourself and your users a favor and tame your blog tags.

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?
3. Do People Search for “Breaking News”?

When it comes to competing for search engine visibility, major news organizations tend to benefit from having strong, trusted domains. But just how strong are those domains?

Using SEOmoz’s new Open Site Explorer I did a head-to-head comparison of 20+ news sites to see which had the most domain authority.

To calculate the scores, SEOmoz uses an amalgamation of link metrics to create a single predictive score for each domain. They refer to domain authority as “our best prediction about how content would perform in search engine rankings on one site vs. another” and claim an accuracy range of about 70%.

So without further ado, here are 20+ major news sites ranked by domain authority and home page authority:

	Domain	Domain authority	Home page authority
1	news.bbc.co.uk	99	92
2	economist.com	99	90
	nytimes.com	99	90
4	msnbc.msn.com	97	89
5	cnn.com	96	92
6	abcnews.go.com	96	90
7	online.wsj.com	95	91
	time.com	95	91
9	usatoday.com	95	91
10	washingtonpost.com	95	90
11	forbes.com	95	89
	guardian.co.uk	95	89
13	latimes.com	94	90
14	timesonline.co.uk	94	90
15	foxnews.com	94	89
	telegraph.co.uk	94	89
17	huffingtonpost.com	94	87
	npr.org	94	87
19	cbsnews.com	93	89
	csmonitor.com	93	89
21	chicagotribune.com	92	89
22	newsweek.com	91	89

In the table home page authority is used to break any ties; if both scores are equal the sites are listed in alphabetical order.

As you can see all of the news sites have domain authority scores of at least 90, and three have scores of 99. Some of these news organizations might like to remember that Google actually holds them in high regard and sends a nice chunk of natural search traffic their way.

I was surprised to see The Economist in the top three because of their subscription wall, but more of their content seems to be accessible to search engines these days.

Related posts:

1. 25 Major News Sites Ranked by Page Speed
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact?

This week both Brian Solis and SEOMoz made reference to a recent Forrester report forecasting US interactive marketing budgets for the next five years. You can check out their posts for the aspects of the report they covered. What caught my eye was the chart on budget allocation across various industries in 2009:

As you can see search marketing got a much greater share of interactive marketing budgets than social media. With all the (justifiable) industry focus on social media this year it’s interesting to note that search marketing is still getting the lion’s share of spending. When it comes to interactive media buys it looks like Google and the other search engines still offer marketers the best opportunities online.

According to Forrester that trend will continue:

Related posts:

1. Social Media Dominates 2010 PR Planning, But SEO Increasingly in the Mix
2. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic
3. Journalist Social Media Usage Increases, Concerns About Reliability of Information

Yesterday Google announced that it is now supporting the rel=”canonical” link element (sometimes referred to as the canonical URL tag) across different domains. This means that in addition to using the tag to help sort of duplicate content issues on a single domain, it can also be used in dealing with duplicate content on more than one domain. (If you’re not familiar with rel=”canonical” see Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag).

In the Q&A in Google’s announcement, one question in particular caught my eye:

Q: I’m offering my content / product descriptions for syndication. Do my publishers need to use rel=”canonical”?

A: We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel=”canonical”, if both parties agree.

At Define we work with a lot of newspaper and magazine sites, many of which have syndication deals with multiple partners. “How can we prevent our syndication partners from outranking us for our own content?” is one of the most common consulting questions we get.

As I covered in my post on syndication best practices, to some extent publishers have to except that they can’t have their cake and eat it too; if you allow your content to be published on other sites there is always a chance that they will outrank you for that content. Since most syndication partners will not agree to block their duplicate versions from search engines, the current best practices are built around reducing the risk of being outranked as opposed to eliminating it.

Now cross-domain support of rel=”canonical” is the best available option to publishers for dealing with duplicate content caused by syndication and establishing the content on their sites as the original source.

It will be interesting to see if publishers are able to get a rel=”canonical” requirement added to future syndication contracts. Most likely the partners will push back, but if you can get them to agree to it you absolutely should. Though it is important to note that Yahoo and Bing are not yet supporting rel=”canonical” across domains, so this solution only applies to Google.

As you can see from the Q&A above Google is going out of its way to avoid offering a specific recommendation on this matter. I guess in the current climate they want to avoid telling news sites how to run their businesses. But they certainly recognize the tag’s value in helping to sort out duplicate content issues caused by syndication.

UNRELATED SIDE NOTE
Right after I published this post I noticed a mistake with the URL, so I immediately re-published with a different URL. Unfortunately that seems to have interfered with the ability for the TweetMeme button to register retweets of this post. I tried testing and playing around with it but I couldn’t sort it out. Anyone ever have this issue? It’s obviously not that big a deal but that zero doesn’t look so hot.

Related posts:

1. Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag
2. Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content
3. The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites

In November Google announced a new format for Google News Sitemaps with several changes including new tags that provide additional detail on each submitted article.

Google is using words like “more flexible,” “easier to submit,” “more control” and even “exciting” to describe the new format and transition period. That may be getting carried away but the new format does have some advantages for publishers, although they are not being fully utilized by Google News yet.

The main opportunity comes from the new tags. While designed to help Google News better interpret and categorize the content in the sitemaps, the tags also provide publishers with additional chances for exposure.

The <genre> tag has the potential to be the most helpful. Content that is not a straightforward news article is now labeled with one of these six values (when applicable):

• PressRelease: an official press release
• Satire: an article which ridicules its subject for didactic purposes
• Blog: any article published on a blog, or in a blog format
• OpEd: an opinion-based article which comes specifically from the Op-Ed section of your site
• Opinion: any other opinion-based article not appearing on an Op-Ed page, i.e., reviews, interviews, etc
• UserGenerated: newsworthy user-generated content which has already gone through a formal editorial review process on your site

The first three (PressRelease, Satire, Blog) are visibly shown on Google News results pages, as in this example for a search on “IBM”:

This will help users seeking specific content types find what they are looking for, potentially resulting in more traffic to that content. It also has the potential to do the opposite; users may disregard non-editorial content such as press releases in greater volume now that it is easier to identify.

Google News does not currently offer the ability to sort by genre in either the left sidebar or the Advanced Search page. Doing so would bring a lot more user functionality to the genre designations, so hopefully it will be added at some point.

Blog content does get some extra exposure however. When a user clicks on the “all X news articles” link at the bottom of a story cluster, Blogs is the second section on the full coverage page:

Two other new tags in Google News Sitemaps are <publication> and <access>. <publication> identifies the name of the news outlet and the language it is published in. While not a big plus for publishers, this can help in properly identifying the source of an article and in matching content in other languages to the appropriate version of Google News.

The <access> tag is used to identify sites that require a subscription or registration. This could be a negative for publishers that fall into those categories as it might result in users favoring other sources. However publishers can avoid having to use this tag by participating in First Click Free. Although in today’s climate such news outlets may instead prefer to just block their content from Google News altogether.

The fourth new tag is the <title> tag, which allows publishers to specify the title of each article. This is a good thing for publishers because it’s not uncommon for Google News to do some strange things in determining article titles itself.

For more information on the new format for Google News Sitemaps, see:

• A new face to Google News Sitemaps
• News Sitemaps format transition FAQ
• News Sitemaps: Creating a News Sitemap
• News Sitemaps: Content types

Publishers should note that there is a six-month grandfather period during which Google News Sitemaps that had been previously submitted in the old format will still be accepted, so there is plenty of time to convert existing sitemaps. However all newly submitted Google News Sitemaps must be in the new format.

Related posts:

1. Google JavaScript Changes Put Publishers in Violation of Sponsored Link Guidelines
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag

Although search engines keep improving on their ability to deal with duplicate content, this continues to be one of the main SEO issues facing news and content sites. Even when the engines do a reasonable job of filtering out duplicates in their results, sites are essentially shooting themselves in the foot by splitting internal and inbound links to a particular piece of content across multiple URLs. Therefore it is critical for publishers to diagnose and eliminate (or at least mitigate) the duplicate content issues on their sites.

Here are the most common causes of duplicate content on news media sites:

1. Tracking codes. Appending tracking codes to URLs (e.g. ?xid=rss or ?cid=top-stories) results in the same piece of content existing on multiple URLs – in some cases quite a large number of URLs. The canonical URL tag is a good way to mitigate this issue.




2. Publishing the same content in multiple sections. An article can be linked from as many sections and locations on the site as desired, but it should only exist on one unique, permanent URL.




3. Repurposing content in new packages. Media sites often pull existing content into new features/packages, typically to create attractive options for advertisers. For example a selection of movie reviews (that also exist in the film section) will be duplicated on a different template in a “What’s Hot This Summer” feature. Since the pages are not exactly the same the canonical URL tag is not the ideal solution, and publishers typically resist consolidating through permanent 301 redirects because they want the content to also exist in its original location. From a SEO perspective, the best approach is to avoid this practice altogether.




4. Syndication. Syndicating content is a common practice and an important revenue stream for publishers. But when the search engines encounter the same article on multiple sites it is likely that one version will be given prominence, and it may not always be the original. My post on syndication best practices covers ways to reduce the risk of being outranked for your own content.




5. CMS issues. Although content management systems have become more SEO friendly over the years most still cause a number of SEO problems, including duplicate content issues. The most common is printer-friendly pages. Or for example in photo galleries the first slide may appear on a different URL when you go back to it via the “previous” button. Conduct a comprehensive SEO site audit to identify CMS and site architecture issues (as well as editorial and marketing issues).

A few other notes on dealing with duplicate content:

• This week Google specifically recommended against using robots.txt to block duplicates, which is a change from previous recommendations.




• In the duplicate content session at SMX East, Google also announced that the canonical URL tag will work across domains by the end of the year (currently it only works with URLs on the same domain). As interesting, Yahoo and Bing admitted that they are still not supporting the current version of the tag but are hoping to by the end of year.




• In September Google added a function to Webmaster Tools called Parameter Handling that allows sites to specify certain URL parameters that can be ignored during crawling. There is a good writeup on the duplicate content implications of this on Search Engine Land: Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore

Related posts:

1. Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content

This week Google started embedding a Hot Trends graph at the bottom of search results pages for queries that fall within their top 100 fastest-rising search terms, as seen in this example screenshot:

While checking out search trends is interesting for users, it can also be valuable to publishers. A tactic that some news and content sites employ is monitoring Google’s Hot Trends list in an effort to identify hot topics and then quickly produce matching content around them.

Does this work? Sometimes. Many search trends come and go quickly, so sites that cover a topic after its peak will likely miss out on the larger search engine visibility opportunity. As I covered in my post on dealing with seasonal search declines, it’s not easy to chase search trends because there is a danger of always ending up one step behind.

But occasionally a search trend has greater sustainability or fits well into a particular site’s area of coverage, in which case jumping in and producing related content can really pay off.

So how do you monitor these trends? The major engines all produce some form of hot topic/trend list, and several third-party and social media sites do as well. You can also use keyword and reputation monitoring tools, real-time search tools and popular/meme lists for articles, tweets, social media submissions, etc.

Here are some free resources for identifying hot topics and search trends. I’ve primarily stuck to aggregated trend/topic lists to keep the list manageable.

Search Engines

• Google Trends: Hot Trends
• Google Insights for Search: “Rising searches” for last 7 days
• Yahoo Buzz Index
• Bing xRank
• Ask.com IQ

Blog Search

• Google Blog Search: Hot Queries (right sidebar)
• Technorati Popular
• MyBlogLog Hot Topics
• IceRocket: Popular (left sidebar)
• BlogPulse Featured Trends

Twitter

• Twitter Search: Trending Topics
• TweetMixx: Trending
• Trendistic (right sidebar)
• Twitscoop: Hot Trends (click on link in top nav)
• TweetMeme
• Retweet
• #hashtags: Newest hashtags
• Twemes

Other Social Media

• Social Mention: Trends
• Addict-o-matic: Hot Topics
• Sency
• Digg: Popular Last 24 hours (other time intervals possible)
• SocialBlade
• Reddit: Top Scoring Links Today (other time intervals possible)
• Delicious Hotlist and Popular
• POPURLs

Related posts:

1. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends
2. 5 Ways to Deal with Seasonal Dips in Search Engine Traffic
3. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media

This week Google put out a video to give publishers more information on how Google News works and how best to optimize for it. I pulled out some of the more useful tips, combining information from some of the slides with additional details provided by Google’s Maile Ohye.

Article Ranking Factors within a Story Cluster

While there are a wide range of ranking factors these four were highlighted:

• Fresh and New – Priority is given to articles that are recent, substantial, original and focused on the topic. Articles need to be “objective news” to lead a story cluster (op-ed, satire, press releases and subscription content are not eligible to lead clusters).




• Duplication and Novelty Detection – More credit is given to original sources of content. Google News uses “Citation Rank” to try to determine the original source (i.e. a lot of subsequent articles linking to a particular source or referencing it within editorial text).




• Local / Personal Relevancy – Weighted by section and story; more credit given to local sources. For example the Charlotte Observer is likely to be given more weight on stories about North Carolina.




• Trusted Sources – Trusted sources are given a boost in each edition and section via various signals. This is data driven and not an “arbitrary decision.” For instance Google News factors in how often articles from particular sources are clicked on in determining user trust.

Image Optimization for News Search

• Use large image sizes with good aspect ratios
• Include descriptive captions and ALT text
• Place image near article title (helps Google News to associate the image with the subject matter)
• Use inline, non-clickable images (as opposed to linking them to something else)
• JPG images are preferred (PNG was specifically cited as not being as good)

Google News Optimization Best Practices

• Articles must be on unique, permanent URLs with at least 3 digits – This helps Google News to differentiate articles from static Web pages. Three digit URLs are not required if you submit an XML news sitemap.




• Don’t break up the article body – Articles should have sequential paragraphs; don’t break them up with user comments or links to related posts.




• Put dates between the title and body – Helps the date extractor to establish the correct publication date.




• Titles matter – Create good HTML title tags and on-page article headlines. The title should be “extremely indicative of the story at hand.”




• Separate original content from press releases (and other forms of non-news content) – separating articles in the directory structure helps Google News identify what is specifically news content.




• Publish informative, unique content – Sites are encouraged to produce strong original content as opposed to repurposing or duplicating stories

Some other information:

• Story clusters (i.e. a group of articles on a particular topic) are ranked according to “aggregate editorial interest.” So news that generates a lot of coverage will be given priority on the home page and category pages.




• Using XML news sitemaps is encouraged.




• Articles are now re-crawled to look for updates, typically within the first 12 hours. This confirms a recent discussion in a Google help thread (See Google News Now Recrawling Updated Articles for more information).




• To get your videos into Google News you need to create a YouTube channel. Other video hosters may be included in the future, but for now YouTube is the only way in. Creating textual descriptions and transcripts is helpful.




• PageRank is a lesser factor in Google News, used “delicately” since the linking structure of a brand new article is going to be different from an article published years or months ago.

Here’s the complete Google News video:

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Pro PR Tips: 100 PR Tips from Rafe Needleman Published as a Book
3. Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?

On Friday Yahoo announced new additions to its SearchMonkey enhanced results, including options for news content.

SearchMonkey allows sites to use structured data to include additional information in their Yahoo search results such as addresses and phone numbers, review scores, pricing, etc.

For news sites, the publication date and a photo can be added to Yahoo search results for articles and opinion pieces, as shown in this example:

To take advantage of the enhanced news results, publishers can either use RDFa markup to embed the news data in their content, or use a NewsML feed to send the data privately to Yahoo. For technical details and instructions see the SearchMonkey News help page.

Once the markup is added the enhanced results should appear in Yahoo after the content has been crawled again. Embedding photos will be a good way for publishers to draw attention on the SERPs and increase clickthrough rates.

Not sure what SearchMonkey is? There’s some background information on the Yahoo Developer Network: SearchMonkey.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo News Syndication: Attribution Links Not SEO-Friendly
2. Rich Snippets: Increase Google Visibility for Reviews through Microformats
3. Google JavaScript Changes Put Publishers in Violation of Sponsored Link Guidelines

July and August are a time when many content sites see a seasonal dip in all forms of traffic, including search engine referrals. Major stories that emerge (such as Michael Jackson or the health care debate) can bring large spikes in search traffic, but it’s common to see the numbers drop after May and not pick up again until September.

This is to be expected, and it’s one reason why year-over-year metrics have more value than month-to-month. The best measuring stick for August 2009 is August 2008, not the months that preceded it.

That said, there are plenty of things that news and content sites can do to improve their search engine referral (and overall) traffic during slow periods.

Here are five ways to mitigate seasonal search traffic declines:

1. Go after hot topics – Regularly monitor the top searches, topics and trend data published by search engines and social media sites for content ideas and opportunities. It’s not easy to chase search trends as there is a danger of always ending up one step behind. But if a particular topic seems sustainable you can gain a share of searches by creating strong, relevant content around it.




2. Bolster your best stuff – Dig into your analytics data and determine which sections and content types tend to perform best in summer. Then make sure you’re doing everything you can to support them on-site, in particular leveraging your internal link structure.




3. Get creative – Develop special features and packages that are likely to garner attention and links. There are lots of good approaches to “link bait” – find the topics and hooks that work for you. Special promotions like contests and giveaways can also be effective.




4. Reach out – You’ve been meaning to get more involved in brand and content awareness building activities such as social media marketing; now’s the time. Research the opportunities and come up with an effective social media strategy. By engaging (appropriately) with your target audiences you’ll indirectly facilitate an increase in traffic and links.




5. Build for the future – Slow seasons are a good time to make improvements to site architecture, update page templates and engage in various forms of testing on the site. Improve the site as a whole so when things pick up again you’ll be stronger than ever.

Related posts:

1. Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining
2. Survey: Twitter Less than 1% of Traffic to Newspapers and Magazines; Facebook 1%
3. Help Haiti: News Sites Promote Ways to Donate

This week Search Engine Roundtable highlighted a Google News Help thread in which Google confirmed that it is now able to recrawl articles that have been updated within a “short period of time” of the original publishing.

Google employee “Inbal” later provided a more specific time window, indicating “the rate at which we recrawl may vary, but we try to go back and check for changes in article content within the first 12 hours after we first find it.”

This is encouraging news for publishers as previously once an article was indexed in Google News no changes or updates to it would be registered. So if an article was accidently published with a typo in the headline and then corrected, Google News would still display the erroneous headline.

More importantly, in breaking news situations articles are often initially published with limited information and then later updated with further details. Previously the only way to get the more comprehensive version into Google News was to republish the article on a new URL, which was not the best experience for either on-site or search engine users.

I went looking for an updated story in Google News today and was able to find an example. When I first checked this updated CNN.com article on the Lockerbie bomber:

Google News was still displaying the original first sentence (which had been changed in the update):

However within a short period of time the Google News snippet had been updated to include the new first sentence:

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?
3. Google News Optimization Tips

Recently I wrote about the importance of including meaningful content in videos embedded in press releases. Today I came across a great example of how to incorporate video and other multimedia content into a news article.

This ESPN.com article on Michael Vick signing with the Philadelphia Eagles features a video player right below the headline with links to four different videos, each of which adds more substance to the article:

Later in the article there’s also a link to an ESPN Radio podcast featuring an interview with one of Vick’s former teammates:

And ESPN supplements the article with a special “Vick Signs With Eagles” sidebar that includes links to more news, blog and video coverage:

The end result is an informative, engaging user experience on a page with strong topical relevancy. That relevancy combined with the fact that the article is likely to be shared and linked to frequently strengthens its ability to compete for search engine visibility.

So far Google seems to agree. As of today the article is #1 (after some embedded news results) for the query “michael vick eagles”:

Related posts:

1. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content
2. Article Highlights: Good for Users, Good for Search Engines
3. Foursquare and The New York Times Archive Would Be a Great Match

Yesterday Steve Rubel pointed out how the article highlights on sites like CNN.com and iMedia Connection are a good time saver for him.

CNN.com places a “Story Highlights” section with bullet points to the right of the headline, for example:

While a great feature for users, article highlights are also an effective SEO technique. The placement of keyword-focused, descriptive bullet points near the top of the page gives the engines useful information for determining the topical relevancy of the page.

A similar method is the more traditional “dek” below the headline, as seen in this example from BusinessWeek.com:

The use of article highlights or summaries is particularly helpful in instances where the on-page headline does not provide a clear, literal description of the content. While editors and producers should always be encouraged to incorporate literal text in their headlines, in reality this won’t always happen. So the highlights help to offset pages with more witty, print-style headlines.

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Great Example of a Multimedia News Article from ESPN.com
3. Twitter Suggested Users – Today’s Studio 54 Velvet Rope

In my post on syndication best practices I noted that one way to reduce the likelihood that partners will outrank you for own content is to require a link back to your original on every syndicated article, for example:

This article originally appeared on Example.com: [direct link to original article, ideally with the headline as the link text]

The use of attribution links is recommended by the engines themselves, although they caution publishers that the links are used as a signal but do not guarantee that the original versions will be given prominence for related search queries.

In looking at syndicated content on Yahoo News, most of the syndicated articles do not include attribution links (each news source likely has to request or provide them), but among those that do exist there is a problem. The Yahoo attribution links do not point directly to the original article URLs. Instead they point to an internal Yahoo News URL which then has a temporary 302 redirect to the original article.

For example at the bottom of this syndicated LiveScience.com article you’ll see the attribution link:

However the link points to:

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/livescience/sc_livescience/storytext/amazonriverdatedto11millionyearsold/32639997/SIG=121l8b9em/*http://www.livescience.com/environment/090708-amazon-river.html

That URL then has a 302 redirect to the original LiveScience.com URL. Yahoo is probably using the temporary redirects for tracking, but this practice is interfering with the SEO value of the links. So if you are negotiating a syndication agreement with Yahoo News, be sure to request attribution links directly to your original URLs, or at least require Yahoo to use permanent 301 redirects.

Going back to the LiveScience.com example, a search today in Google using the exact headline “Amazon River Dated to 11 Million Years Old” brings up these top results:

Another site becomes the de facto #1 through an embedded Google News result, followed by the Yahoo News syndicated article and then the LiveScience.com original.

The good news for LiveScience.com is that Google is showing both results instead of filtering out their page in favor of the Yahoo version on a stronger domain. However the split result is certainly costing them clicks.

Related posts:

1. Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content
2. Yahoo Adds Enhanced News Results to SearchMonkey
3. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?

Syndicating content is an important business development initiative for publishers; it generates revenue, increases exposure, drives traffic and helps facilitate inbound links. However from an SEO perspective there is a downside, as syndication creates duplicate content issues. Search engines don’t want to show users multiple versions of the same content, so when an article has been syndicated it’s likely that one version will be given prominence – and that may or may not be the original.

One of the most common concerns I hear from publishers is the fact that syndication partners are outranking them for their own content. This is a fairly common occurrence, especially when the partners are strong, authoritative domains and their syndicated versions attract a lot of links. To some extent publishers have to accept that they can’t have their cake and eat it too – if you’re going to license your content to other sites, there is always a chance that those sites might outrank you for that content.

The only way to completely eliminate the issue is to require syndication partners to block their versions from the engines. Partners typically refuse such an arrangement, but it’s becoming a more common request in contract negotiations.

Beyond that, there are steps that publishers can take to help reduce the risk of being outranked for their own content:

1. Require partners to link back to the original on every syndicated article, for example: This article originally appeared on Example.com: [direct link, ideally with the headline as the link text]. It is important for the link to point directly to the original URL
2. Publish the content on your site and allow it to be indexed prior to releasing it to partners
3. Limit the amount of the text that is syndicated – instead of giving partners the full content, allow them to publish a reduced snippet of the article
4. Require partners to use generic title tags (e.g. their site name) on their versions

In its tips for dealing with duplicate content, Google specifically refers to the attribution link but with a caveat:

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we’ll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.

You can see that the attribution link is recommended, but it is not guaranteed to resolve the issue. So it is important to build in as many protective steps as possible into any syndication contract.

UPDATE:
In December 2009 Google began supporting the rel=”canonical” tag across different domains, giving publishers another tool to use in mitigating duplicate content issues caused by syndication. Check out Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals? for more information.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo News Syndication: Attribution Links Not SEO-Friendly
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites

Among news sites “breaking news” is a sought-after keyword phrase; I see it prominently placed in home page title tags all the time:

And it’s not just general news sites. “Breaking news” is featured in the title tags of sites covering sports, entertainment and a wide range of topics.

Seeing this term targeted so often got me wondering, does anyone actually search for “breaking news”?

If I’m looking for breaking news on a particular topic I’ll search with queries using that topic, for example “Air France crash” or “Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court.”

And if I want to get an overview of the current news of the day I’ll go to Google News or Yahoo! News, or direct navigate to a major news site. But I don’t think I’d ever simply type “breaking news” into a search engine.

However, according to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, some people do:

Currently CNN.com and MSNBC.com are the top two listings in Google for “breaking news.” It would be interesting to learn how much search engine traffic they are getting from that specific term.

Related posts:

1. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
2. News Sites: Tame Your Blog Tags
3. Real-time Search Optimization for News Sites

Last week at the Google I/O developer conference it was announced that Google is now able to execute JavaScript onClick events, which basically means that links in JavaScript that were previously inaccessible can now be read and pass PageRank. Vanessa Fox did an extensive write-up for Search Engine Land which covers the changes in detail.

While it’s good news that Google is continuing to improve its ability to deal with JavaScript, this change also impacts the way that many publishers display sponsored links on their sites. In addition to the nofollow attribute, using JavaScript has long been a popular way to ensure that sponsored links adhere to Google’s guidelines by making them inaccessible to crawlers, as seen in this example:

To be clear, selling sponsored links is a perfectly legitimate business practice and an important part of most publishers’ advertising sales strategy. What Google doesn’t want is for those links to have SEO value, which is why their guidelines dictate that paid links are coded in a way that they will not pass PageRank.

Previously, sponsored links in JavaScript such as those in the example above could not be read by crawlers and thus were in compliance with Google’s guidelines. Now those same links can potentially be read and pass PageRank, which means they are technically violating the rules.

Is Google going to run out and start penalizing sites with sponsored links in JavaScript? I can’t imagine they would, especially when virtually no one outside of the developer and SEO communities is even aware that this change has taken place.

That said, there are some simple ways to ensure that JavaScript links do adhere to Google’s guidelines, so it’s best to address this now and ensure that your site is in compliance. It can be done by redirecting the sponsored links to an intermediate page that is blocked via robots.txt, or by applying the nofollow attribute to the JavaScript links (see the Vanessa Fox writeup as well as the second half of this article in SEL for more detail).

Related posts:

1. Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?

In looking over a post on the Google News blog from a few months ago on ways to help Google News better crawl your site, this tip in particular caught my eye:

* Article Titles in Google News

In order for Google News to crawl the correct titles for your articles, make sure the title you want appears in both the title tag and as the headline on the article page. In addition, don’t hyperlink the headline on the article page – after all, your reader is already there! And it’s always a good idea to have links that point to your articles use the article title as anchor text.

(The headline/title tag tip is also included in their Help for Publishers guidelines on article titles).

That’s interesting because a basic best practice in editorial SEO is to customize on-page headlines in the title tag (when necessary) to make them more literal and keyword focused. Of course headlines should be keyword focused as well, but for a variety of reasons that doesn’t always happen, so customizing the title tag is a good way to offset the issue when needed.

I scanned through some of the Top Stories on Google News today – the majority of articles I checked did have the exact headline in the title tag, but in some cases it had been customized, as in this NYTimes.com example:

In cases where the headline and title tag didn’t match it was the headline that was used by Google News. So it appears this tip is intended to make it easier for Google News to understand the correct title for articles, as opposed to being a “must do” to prevent an issue.

Using the exact article title in the anchor text of links doesn’t always happen either. Due to space limitations and to try to grab on-site users’ attention, news sites sometimes use shorter and/or wittier “tout links” on home pages, section fronts and in popular content modules. But linking with the article headline is something that publishers should do when possible.

Related posts:

1. Google News Optimization Tips
2. Article Highlights: Good for Users, Good for Search Engines
3. News Sites: Tame Your Blog Tags

One of the announcements at Searchology yesterday was a new enhancement called Rich Snippets, in which Google is using structured data embedded in web pages (microformats and RDFa) to give users “convenient summary information about their search results at a glance.”

Initially Google is supporting data on reviews and people. Reviews in particular offer a good opportunity for publishers as many content sites produce multiple types of reviews on a regular basis. Through Rich Snippets you can draw greater attention to your listings in the search results, which helps to increase clickthroughs to your content.

Here’s an example Rich Snippet from a Yelp listing for restaurant in New York that I like:

To take advantage of this opportunity you need to add microformat or RDFa markup to the source code of your review pages, which is pretty straightforward. You can follow Google’s guidelines for marking up structured data to learn how to do it, including the specific properties for reviews.

It’s important to note that marking up your pages doesn’t guarantee that your listings will get Rich Snippets, as Google says they will be rolling them out gradually. But now is a good time to begin experimenting with it.

For more information check out:

• Introducing Rich Snippets
• Google Search Now Supports Microformats and Adds “Rich Snippets” to Search Results

UPDATE:
Since the initial introduction Google has added Rich Snippets support for video and events.

Related posts:

1. Google JavaScript Changes Put Publishers in Violation of Sponsored Link Guidelines
2. Yahoo Adds Enhanced News Results to SearchMonkey
3. Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?

Really you shouldn’t need it. What you should be doing is avoiding duplicate content altogether. Every piece of content on your site should exist on one permanent, unique URL, and any duplicate pages should be consolidated through 301 redirects. But for a variety of business, technical or editorial reasons, sometimes publishing the same content or resolving the same page on more than one URL simply can’t be avoided.

On newspaper and magazine sites, the main culprit is typically the practice of appending tracking codes to the end of URLs, for example: www.yoursite.com/article?xid=rss (or ?xid=topstories or ?cid=partner, etc…).

Until recently the best solution offered up was to append tracking codes with a hash mark (#) instead of a question mark (?), as suggested by Stephan Spencer and Nathan Buggia, among others.

Fortunately the major engines came to the rescue in February with the Canonical URL tag, which allows sites to identify which URL is the canonical or primary version of a page. It is placed in the <head> of any duplicate pages and points to the canonical URL for the page:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/canonical-URL"/>

Google describes the canonical URL tag as a “hint that we honor strongly” as opposed to a firm directive, so the use of the tag does not guarantee that all duplicate content issues will be resolved. However it greatly increases the likelihood that the canonical version of a page will be the one displayed in the search results, and if it functions as described, it will also transfer the value of links pointing to the duplicate pages to the canonical URL.

This means that publishers can append tracking codes to URLs as needed while avoiding the duplicate content issues that place the content at a competitive disadvantage.

It’s still early days for the tag, but based on results from some magazine sites we work with that have been experimenting with it, I’d say so far, so good.

Related posts:

1. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
2. The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites
3. Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content