Google’s recent algorithm change that favors the most recent content for certain types of queries offers good opportunities for news and content sites. But for individuals and organizations, does the freshness update make online reputation management more difficult?

If you cover breaking news, hot topics or regularly occurring events the freshness update will create more chances for your latest content to surface highly for general search queries (like the name of a celebrity, sports team or TV show). Essentially Google has turned up the dial on its “query deserves freshness” algorithm.

But let’s say you are an individual or company that is trying to combat negative listings that rank highly for your name.

A fundamental part of online reputation management (ORM) involves pushing down those negative listings and getting more positive or neutral results better entrenched on page one. This is typically done through things like subdomains, social profiles and more favorable media coverage.

At times when your name is in the news (for reasons you’d prefer it wasn’t) an increase in the number of “fresh” listings on page one means it will be more difficult to keep negative coverage off of page one.

How It Works

Unfortunately a recent example that illustrates this concept in action is Joe Paterno and the terrible events that allegedly took place at Penn State.

Last week a search on “joe paterno” brought up these results one page one in Google:

[Click to enlarge the image]

While the #1 and #2 organic listings are still a general bio and a Wikipedia page, the news onebox at the top and all eight listings under the embedded image results are related to the scandal.

Prior to the freshness change the news onebox would have still been prominent but only 2-3 of the natural listings would likely have been brand new content.

From a user perspective it makes sense to favor fresh content for this query, since it is likely that the majority of people searching for “joe paterno” or “penn state” last week were looking for information on the recent news.

But for the individual or organization in question, the resulting shake-up in the SERPs can be troubling.

To be clear, Joe Paterno is very serious example and I am not implying that he should have an ORM team helping to clean up his search results. It is simply a recent event that illustrates the Google freshness update in action.

What You Can Do

There are instances in which a company or individual is hit by a wave of negative coverage, whether fairly or not. At such times an increase in fresh results means it will be more challenging to keep unfavorable coverage out of the page one results.

So in that sense the Google freshness update does make online reputation management more challenging for PR and SEO professionals.

However, an important takeaway is the fact that the freshness update works both ways. It may bring more unfavorable content to the forefront, but it can just as easily give a boost to positive content.

At times when negative coverage is increasing, your ability to respond quickly with new content that conveys your side the story (through both owned media and earned media) will increase the likelihood that not all of the fresh listings will be negative.

It will also be important to continue to produce and generate additional favorable content for as long as the freshness algorithm continues to be triggered for your name.

You won’t be able to keep out all of the negative listings, but you can at least create a better balance in what users encounter in the fresh results.

Interested in learning more about Google’s freshness update? Check out:

• Giving You Fresher, More Recent Search Results – Official Google Blog
• Google Search Algorithm Change for Freshness to Impact 35% of Searches – Search Engine Land
• Google’s “Freshness” Update – Whiteboard Friday – SEOmoz

Related posts:

1. Rich Snippets: Increase Google Visibility for Reviews through Microformats
2. Do Google’s Expanded Domain Results Apply to News and Video Listings?
3. Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?

News publishers are all too familiar with the fact that Google News doesn’t always do such a great job of favoring original sources in its story clusters. It is not usual to see a syndicated, aggregated or simply re-covered version of an article gain prominent visibility over the original.

Today I noticed an example that is worth pointing out because you’d think Google News would be able to handle it properly.

On the home page the lead article in a story cluster about the Facebook music platform came from Tom’s Guide.

What caught my attention was the fact that in the article summary the original source CNBC was mentioned twice, yet the CNBC article did not appear in the cluster:

And in fact if you look at the Tom’s Guide article in addition to multiple CNBC citations there are two links (although one is nofollow) to the original CNBC article:

You’d think that would be a strong enough signal for Google News to favor the CNBC original over Tom’s Guide.

But the CNBC article wasn’t present in the cluster and in clicking through to the Full Coverage page it was also nowhere to be found:

I clicked on each of the “All X related articles” links on the Full Coverage page but did not see the CNBC article anywhere.

Even a search on “cnbc facebook music” brought up the Tom’s Guide article but not the CNBC original:

The only way I could get the CNBC article to come up was with a “site:cnbc.com facebook music” search, confirming that it was in fact indexed in Google News:

In my post on Google News Optimization Tips I list the article ranking factors within a story cluster, in which Google specifically references that fact that it attempts to give priority to original articles and that Citation Rank is utilized to help determine original sources.

However that clearly was not working in this case.

Based on the story cluster ranking factors about the only advantage the Tom’s Guide article had going for it was the fact that it was about six hours more recent than the original (according to their Google News listings).

The CNBC article had more tweets, Facebook likes and Google +1’s than the Tom’s Guide piece, so social signals weren’t at play either.

I’m not directly familiar with either site’s SEO or news search optimization practices. The CNBC title tag is not great but both articles have decent headlines, which is more important for Google News. Perhaps Tom’s Guide is making better use of Google News sitemaps which calls better attention to their content.

But even if that were the case Tom’s Guide itself makes it abundantly clear that CNBC is the original source of the news, so you’d think Google News could account for that.

Doesn’t seem right, does it?

Related posts:

1. Great Example of a Multimedia News Article from ESPN.com
2. Google News Now Recrawling Updated Articles
3. Google News Optimization Tips

Google’s expanded sitelinks give sites greater exposure for branded searches and the ability to dominate the page one results above the fold.

User reactions have been mixed so far (some find them overwhelming or borderline obnoxious) but Google is touting the user benefits and the expanded sitelinks appear to be here to stay.

That means that sites should take advantage of the opportunity to increase clickthroughs to those pages by optimizing their META description tags in a slightly different way.

As can be seen Google typically pulls in about 30-35 characters for each snippet:

This gives new importance to the first several words in the META description tag on those pages. While not a lot of room to work with site owners should ensure that those opening words result in a meaningful snippet.

It is also important to make sure that each of the sitelink pages has a META description tag. MLB and the Chicago Bulls offer examples of what can get pulled in from pages with no META description tag and not much text content:

—

Related posts:

1. Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag
2. Blog Tag Optimization Tips for News Sites
3. Do Google’s Expanded Domain Results Apply to News and Video Listings?

eHow is back in the news after claims it was hit hard by latest expansion of Google’s Panda update and subsequent denials from Demand Media. Articles like “How to Pour Water Into a Glass Cup” make it difficult to dispute eHow’s reputation as the poster child of content farms. But in terms of keyword targeting, how different is eHow from major news sites?

To get a rough idea I used SEMRush to look at the sites that have the most keywords in common with eHow. SEMRush’s “Competitors in Google” report ranks a site’s competitors by the number of keyword phrases for which both sites appear in Google’s organic search results.

So at a very basic level the more common keywords two sites share, the more similar they are at least in terms of keyword targeting.

I exported the first 10,000 results from SEMRush and went through the first few thousand looking for major news sites, primarily newspapers, national and local news organizations and online news sites. Then I added in a few major tech news sites to round out the list.

Here are the 50 news sites with the most keywords in common with eHow, according to SEMRush:

The New York Times tops the list with more than 100K keywords in common with eHow. It was #46 on the overall list of competitors. It should be pointed out however that with over 10 million nytimes.com pages in Google’s index the keyword overlap represents only 1% of NYT content.

USA Today and CNN also have considerably more common keywords than the other news sites on the list. The top 10 all share 29K or more keyword phrases with eHow.

What kinds of keywords do the news sites have in common with eHow?

Here are some of the terms shared with The New York Times:

Kind of an odd mix, but I spot checked the terms and both sites do surface in my Google results. In looking at the shared keywords for several sites, the commonality stems from both evergreen content on the news sites and news content on more general topics.

An important thing to point out however is that shared keywords do not necessarily mean shared quality. Just because some news sites are covering similar topics to eHow does not mean the quality of the content is the same.

That said Google is surfacing both the news sites and eHow for related search queries.

Which sites of any type share the most common keywords with eHow?

Here are the top 25 according to SEMRush:

Related posts:

1. eHow and Mahalo: How Many Keyword Variations is Too Many?
2. The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites
3. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?

The launch of Google’s Page Speed Online (which allows users to get Page Speed scores without installing a browser extension) reminded me that it has been a year since I looked at the page load times of major news sites. So I thought I’d go back and see if there have been any performance changes in the past year.

Last year in 25 Major News Sites Ranked by Page Speed I ran the Page Speed tool on the home page of a selection of online news sites including newspapers, magazines, TV sites, wire services and other news organizations.

Today I checked each of those home pages again and ranked the sites by improvement. As a reminder Page Speed scores range from 0-100 with a higher score indicating better performance.

While the average improvement across all of the sites is only 2.3% several sites saw significant improvements, particularly The Economist at 27%. However eight sites had lower Page Speed scores than last year with seven of them showing decreases from 2.9% to 17.6%.

The Reuters home page was the poorest performer, dropping from 74 to 20 for a massive decrease of 73%. I checked it several times so the score is correct according to Google. Maybe there was just something odd on the Reuters home page on this particular day, or perhaps there is a larger problem that can be addressed (see below). I also checked a couple of articles on Reuters; while those pages fared better than the home page they still scored poorly (36 and 40).

Regardless of the cause, this shows why it is good to frequently monitor site performance because you never know when an issue will crop up. On news and content sites sudden, significant changes in page load time are often related to advertisements or third-party implementations.

So which sites are now the best performers? Here are the news sites ranked by current home page Site Speed score:

The UK’s Daily Mail was tied for third last year; this year it is the only site to break 90. (The 92 rating is actually for http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ushome/index.html which is the URL that the Google tool was redirected to). One year later Yahoo News and CBS News are still in the top three. Telegraph.co.uk went from tied for 7th in 2010 to being tied for 4th this year.

It is important to note that home page load times will vary depending on what is on the page on a particular day, so each site’s scores fluctuate a bit from day to day. Nonetheless these single-day snapshots allow for some basic analysis and comparison, both competitively and YoY.

Back to poor Reuters and its 20 Page Speed score, here are the improvements that Google suggested:

Related posts:

1. 25 Major News Sites Ranked by Page Speed
2. 20+ Major News Sites Ranked by Domain Authority
3. The Top News Sites on Blekko

In reading a Search Engine Land article about Jason Calacanis’ remarks during “Ending the Content Arms Race” at Signal LA this passage caught my eye:

Calacanis shows a “How to cook a turkey” page on Mahalo which he says has tons of good video content, then decries it has to compete against 17 different articles from eHow on every variation of how someone might want to cook a turkey. “Do you guys understand now why I’m going insane?”

eHow and Demand Media’s reputation for creating large volumes of low quality content are well known so no need to go into that here. But a more practical topic for content publishers is when it comes to keyword targeting, how many variations is too many?

As I covered in my post on editorial SEO tactics mapping out the keyword universe around a particular topic and making sure that all aspects of it are being effectively covered is a worthwhile effort. It is particularly helpful for sites with a lot of evergreen content. But that is very different from recycling what is essentially the same information on multiple pages in an effort to target several keyword variations.

So what’s the right approach? Put yourself in your reader’s shoes. If there is not enough unique content to warrant a separate article, don’t make one. In such cases a single high-quality page is better for users and ultimately better for SEO. It avoids keyword cannibalization and allows internal and inbound links to be focused on a single URL.

In cases where there is enough unique content to warrant multiple articles, then smart keyword targeting combined with an effective internal linking strategy offers good opportunities to increase the search engine visibility of all of the pages.

For help with targeting multiple keywords on one page vs. several pages see When Keyword Targeting Gets Tough and Keyword Targeting: How to Employ Multiple Keywords for SEO & Conversions from SEOmoz.

Let’s go back to the “how to cook a turkey” example. There is little benefit to recycling the same basic instructions on multiple pages with slightly different keyword targets. However, there are in fact a lot of different ways to cook a turkey and many different turkey recipes out there.

So having a reasonable number of unique pages focused on different ways to cook turkey is ultimately helpful to users and allows a site to go after a variety of different keyword targets. It’s just a matter of striking a proper balance.

Finally, Jason Calacanis might not want to throw too many stones at eHow. As of today Mahalo has 123 pages in Google’s index with “cook” and “turkey” in the title tag. And 53 of them have been filtered out by Google for being very similar to other pages:

UPDATE:
Be sure to check out the comments; there’s a good discussion going between Jason and several others on the quality of eHow vs. Mahalo and Mahalo’s plans for improvement.

Related posts:

1. Which News Sites Have the Most Keywords in Common with eHow?
2. Press Release Optimization Checklist and Tips
3. Editorial SEO Tactics for the Newsroom

For the past couple years Google has been embedding a Hot Trends graph in the regular search results for the top 100 fastest rising terms.

I referenced this in my post on tools for monitoring search and social trends because it was a useful way to check for trending terms beyond the top 20 shown on the Hot Searches page.

Then in December a colleague pointed out that the graphs were no longer being embedded in the search results. I’ve been spot checking since then and have yet to see them again in my own results.

Clicking on the Hot Searches links still brings up the graphs for the top 20 (see below) but the graphs no longer appear in the SERPs.

Did Google discontinue this feature?

I did some checking but can’t find any official confirmation or references in other places.

Related posts:

1. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
2. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends
3. Do Google’s Expanded Domain Results Apply to News and Video Listings?

By now most editorial sites are employing basic SEO best practices in the newsroom but how many are taking full advantage of every opportunity?

To be successful an editorial staff needs to do more do more than just optimize headlines and title tags; there are a wide range of editorial SEO tactics that need to be employed.

Here are some of the key areas to address:

To be clear this is not meant to encompass the full spectrum of technical, editorial and marketing components in a comprehensive SEO program. The aim is to highlight the fundamental tactics that an editorial staff should incorporate into its daily workflow.

• Optimize for relevant, popular keywords – this is the tactic that most newsrooms focus on, typically in a reactive manner. First content is created then the key page elements (title tag, headline, URL, image attributes, etc.) are optimized to improve keyword focus. Keyword research tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool or WordTracker are used to determine the best terms to optimize for. It is a fundamental part of editorial SEO but it is only the beginning.
• Take advantage of trending topics and hot searches – regularly monitoring search and social media trends provides insight into what users are looking for, discussing and sharing right now. There are a variety of free search and social trend tools available and the data is useful both for keyword targeting and for discovering content opportunities. While this tactic is most applicable to sites that cover breaking news and popular topics like sports and entertainment it works in other areas too (see Search Trend Optimization for Evergreen Content).
• Integrate with social media efforts – social media is having an increasing impact on search engine visibility as the engines incorporate more social signals into their ranking algorithms. A spike in social activity around a particular piece of content will directly and indirectly lead to greater exposure in search, so it is important to coordinate editorial production and content promotion through social media. As I covered in my post on Twitter tips for publishers the goal is have new content surface in news search, real-time search and social search all around the same time, all of which helps with regular Web search visibility too.
• Use tools for content ideas and planning – Keyword and research and trend tools are not just for optimizing content that has already been created; they are also a good resource for new content ideas. An editorial staff can map out the keyword universe around a particular topic or story and make sure that all aspects are being effectively covered by the site. This can then be blended into both short and long-term editorial planning. There are a number of free and paid tools that are helpful in this area such as Google Insights for Search and SEMRush as well as enterprise-level options like Hitwise and ComScore Marketer. Other sources include looking at Google Instant results and even the Google Wonder Wheel. A site’s own analytics reporting and the search queries data in Google Webmaster Tools will provide further insight into current coverage and performance as well as opportunities for expansion and improvement.
• Package content to maximize ranking potential – it doesn’t matter how compelling or keyword-focused a piece of content is if its format is not conducive to SEO success. Articles and blog posts are fairly straightforward but other types of content can create challenges. Over-use of galleries is a common issue as this can result in pages with too little content to be effective search landing pages, or content buried too deep to attract inbound links. Conversely covering too many topics in a single page format splits keyword focus and makes it difficult to compete for any of the targets. And graphic-intensive or interactive formats may leave the engines with little to use in understanding what the content is about. When it comes to content packaging there is a balancing act that needs to be achieved between business objectives, user experience and search-friendliness. Editors and producers should evaluate format options on a case-by-case basis.
• Make effective use of linking – most publishers aren’t shy about internal and cross-networking linking. Go to any content site and you’ll see plenty of navigation, tout, related and recirc links in a variety of forms and locations. But many sites are not making good use of inline editorial links, which tend to have greater SEO value (see #5 in All Links are Not Created Equal from SEOmoz). That’s where the editorial staff comes in; their ability to incorporate useful, appropriate links within content is a powerful tool. This kind of curated approach is much more effective than automating the process. Building some form of suggested link functionality into the CMS is a good idea but the editorial staff should decide what links to include and where.

At the center of all this is quality content; without that none of these tactics matter. However it is equally true that simply creating quality content is not enough. To succeed today content needs to be effectively targeted and optimized for search and social.

What other SEO tactics should newsrooms employ?

Related posts:

1. AOL Newsroom: A Model for the Future or Shades of 2001?
2. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
3. Fewer PR Organizations Plan to Increase Focus on SEO and Social Media in 2011

Sites have been using the rel=canonical link element for a while now to help offset duplicate content issues that cannot be eliminated through URL consolidation.

While not a perfect solution it is often the best option available in cases like duplicate content caused by appending tracking codes to URLs (e.g. ?source=rss, ?xid=newsletter, ?nav=home).

Marketing teams like to track referrals from newsletters, RSS, partnerships, internal navigation, etc. and they typically don’t want to give that up. So rel=canonical has been a welcome tactic and it works relatively well at least for Google (c’mon Bing, you can do it!).

But you still end up with lots of inbound links to non-canonical URLs because users will naturally link to and share the URLs they see in their browsers. While rel=canonical in theory sorts out the indexation and link popularity issues it doesn’t work perfectly, and not every engine supports it or processes it effectively.

Furthermore, if a link coded with “newsletter” gets shared widely on Twitter or somewhere else the data provided by that tracking code is no longer an accurate representative of newsletter traffic.

Here’s an idea: why not let browsers help out?

For pages with a rel=canonical link element, browsers could display the canonical URL instead of whatever duplicate URL the user may have clicked on to arrive at the page. The referral to the coded URL would still be passed to the site’s analytics software but users would see the canonical URL. Thus any resulting new links would point to the canonical URLs.

Users would get cleaner, simpler, consistent URLs and over time there would be fewer links to duplicate URLs and less work for the engines to do in processing duplicate content.

There may be technical reasons why this wouldn’t work and it could only be applied when the canonical URL is on the same domain (though cross-domain implementation of rel=canonical is still rare). Plus not all causes of duplicate content are as straightforward as tracking codes so there might be situations in which displaying the canonical URL in the browser could create a confusing user experience. But it seems like an interesting idea.

Google could test it with Google Chrome to see if it can help itself out; Microsoft could do the same with Internet Explorer to ease the burden on Bing. And Firefox, Safari and other browsers could follow suit just to be helpful.

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

With Blekko officially launching this week the new search engine is getting a lot of attention particularly in the search marketing community because of SEO data it provides.

There is a good overview of Blekko’s SEO Tools on Search Engine Land so I won’t go into detail on that here. But I was curious to compare the data provided for major news sites. I’d previously done this for SEOmoz domain authority and page speed so I thought I’d add Blekko to the mix.

To access Blekko’s SEO data for a domain or a specific URL click the “seo” link within Blekko’s search results:

Or simply type the domain or URL into the search box followed by “/seo”:

You can also access the SEO data through the Blekko toolbar.

For the purposes of comparison I pulled the hostrank, inbound links and site pages data for 30+ major news sites. As usual I picked a cross-section of news outlets that cover national/international news including newspapers, magazines, TV, wires and Web-only properties.

In the table below the news sites are ranked by hostrank. Blekko doesn’t provide information on how the hostrank scores are calculated but think of it roughly along the lines of Google’s PageRank or SEOMoz’s mozRank (though on a different scale).

BBC News and The New York Times lead the pack with The Guardian, CNN and The Washington Post not too far behind. It is interesting that BBC News beats out the NYT despite having significantly fewer (reported) inbound links and indexed pages.

A large group of sites have hostrank scores in the 3,000s or 4,000s so there is not a lot of separation between the news organizations in the middle of the pack.

The AOL News hostrank figure seems strangely low but I doubled checked it and that’s what Blekko is reporting:

Side note: when I compared news sites on social media engagement there was a question about which domain was used for MSNBC. As with the PostRank data used in that post, even though the MSNBC site is on msnbc.msn.com the Blekko data for msnbc.com shows larger figures so I used that domain instead.

Related posts:

1. 20+ Major News Sites Ranked by Domain Authority
2. The Most Buried News Sites on Digg
3. Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement?

Monitoring search trends and hot topics for keyword targeting and content ideas is a common practice among publishers these days. While this pollutes the search results when taken to the extreme (see below), done right it is an effective editorial SEO tactic.

The Hot Searches on Google Trends tend to be dominated by topics like sports, politics and entertainment with frequent breaking news and stories that attract a lot of attention. It is also common to see terms that suddenly enter the popular consciousness for one reason or another.

For publishers that focus on evergreen content such as lifestyle topics the available trend data is much more limited. But that doesn’t mean that opportunities never arise.

For example yesterday I noticed this tweet from @YahooSearchData:

I’m not sure what drove the sudden spike in search activity around “polenta” but it is a perfect fit for sites that cover recipes, cooking and food-oriented topics.

Here’s another example: this past weekend both Google Trends and Social Mention were showing multiple trending phrases around “pumpkin carving patterns” and “jack-o-lantern templates”:

It doesn’t take trend tools to realize that pumpkin carving searches rise sharply around Halloween. But monitoring these tools also provides insight into exactly how users are searching around a particular topic (right now as opposed to historically). That offers an immediate and actionable optimization opportunity.

So regardless of your area of coverage, it pays to keep an eye on trending topics. Search trend and social media data is useful for optimizing specific pieces, developing new content ideas and ongoing editorial planning.

For more ways to track activity, see my post on Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends. And don’t forget to identify your own top trends by looking at your internal data.

The Down Side

That all sounds great, but unfortunately reputable content sites are not the only ones employing these tactics. There are a growing number of sites that pump out low-quality, ad-heavy articles targeting whatever search terms happen to be trending that day.

Amazingly some qualify as Google News sources which enables them to secure high placement for popular searches via embedded news results.

Here are a few examples of embedded Google News results I saw yesterday for searches around pumpkin carving:

I’d rather not link to the articles in question so I’ll include some screenshots and let you judge for yourself:

Do these articles offer users what they were looking for, actual pumpkin carving patterns and templates? In going through 6-8 embedded news results in most cases the answer was no.

The Liston Daily article does have some (rather small) carving templates at the bottom of their article, but the headline and the giant block of ads at the top seems to reveal their motivation in creating it.

Interestingly the Examiner article appears to be going after both the “pumpkin carving pattern” search trend and the spike in searches around President Obama’s visit to Rhode Island.

At the bottom of the page they even link to a large group of “related” articles (most of similar quality) in an attempt to convey greater topical relevancy:

It is certainly ambitious.

I can’t imagine Google is happy with the quality of these embedded news results and they certainly don’t want it to be this easy to game Google News. But it happens quite a bit.

To be clear it is not just evergreen content that is affected; Google News manipulation happens every day in all kinds of subject areas. But since there is less news content around lifestyle topics and many reputable lifestyle sites do not qualify as Google News sources the bad examples tend to get prominent placement more easily.

The good news is that manipulative practices and poor quality results do tend to eventually get weeded out. And the main Web search results are typically fairly good for evergreen content searches (trending or otherwise). So don’t get discouraged; there is plenty of upside for sites that produce quality, relevant content on things like seasonal lifestyle topics.

Related posts:

1. Real-time Search Optimization for News Sites
2. Google Trends Graphs No Longer Embedded in Search Results?
3. Do People Search for “Breaking News”?

As first covered by Malcolm Coles and later confirmed by Google, for search queries that include a specific domain Google is now showing a larger number of results from that site on page one. This gives publishers the opportunity for greater exposure to users looking for content from their specific site (and who may not be familiar with the “site:” search operator). But do the expanded results apply to the embedded news and video listings in the SERPs?

In my results today for the query “Iraq troops nytimes” The New York Times got three Google News results right at the top of the page along with seven organic listings:

However in my results for “Michael Jordan ESPN” USA Today and the Detroit Free Press got the Google News listings:

Only after clicking through on the “News for Michael Jordan ESPN” link did an ESPN article get added to the Google News cluster. Perhaps the other sites have fresher related articles but between free agent news and a “30 for 30” documentary debuting today ESPN does have current content for the query.

Checking another example, the news listing in my results for “egg recall CNN” was for NECN.com not CNN.com although it should be noted that “CNN” appears twice in that article. But CNN did get two embedded video listings on the page, beating out YouTube:

Finally, for the query “mosque near ground zero ABC” NPR and AP got the Google News listings, not ABC. ABC did get one of the video listings with the other going to the Australian Broadcasting Company which also has “abc” in its domain:

[As a side note, I tried to use the query “Islamic cultural center near ground zero” for this example but since most news outlets are using variations of “ground zero mosque” in their headlines I was unable to trigger a news result for it.]

Conclusions
It is important to note that everyone’s Google results are a bit different based on what data center they are hitting, when they do the search, the degree of personalization, etc. In fact even running the same queries 30 minutes later gave me different results in some cases than what is pictured above. So a handful of examples from one individual does not make for a comprehensive sampling.

But based on what I saw today Google’s expanded domain results do not apply to the embedded Google News listings. It does happen some of the time but this looks like a coincidence based on algorithmic relevance as opposed to being by design. News brands seem to fare better with the embedded video listings although I also came across several examples (not pictured above) in which YouTube got both results.

On a related note, it will be interesting to see what impact the new expanded results will have on search referrals to news and content sites. Most newspapers and magazines get a significant amount of natural search traffic from branded queries but queries that combine a specific topic plus a brand are much less common. As awareness of the Google change grows this may impact user behavior; time will tell.

Related posts:

1. Great Example of a Multimedia News Article from ESPN.com
2. 20+ Major News Sites Ranked by Domain Authority
3. Yahoo Adds Enhanced News Results to SearchMonkey

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. Google Page Speed Ratings One Year Later: News Sites Range from Up 27% to Down 73%
3. Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media 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 smaller 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. Do People Search for “Breaking News”?
2. Blog Tag Optimization Tips for News Sites
3. Which News Sites Have the Most Keywords in Common with eHow?

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. The Huffington Post’s Kim Kardashian Tag-o-Rama
2. Google News Optimization Tips
3. Real-time Search Optimization for News Sites

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. Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement?
3. The Top News Sites on Blekko

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. Pew Research News Survey: Findings on Search Engines, Social Networks and Twitter
2. Corporate Social Media Marketing is about Two-Way Communication
3. Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?

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. Should Browsers Display Only Canonical URLs to Users?

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 News Not Always So Great at Favoring Original Sources
2. Google News Now Recrawling Updated Articles
3. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?

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:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. Should Browsers Display Only Canonical URLs to Users?
3. Which News Sites Have the Most Keywords in Common with eHow?

(Note: Updated June 2011 – see list of trend tools below)

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.

UPDATE:
Free trend tools frequently come and go especially in the social space, so I’ll try to update this list periodically. My most recent update is June 2011.

If you know of any others please let me know.

Search Engines

• Google Trends: Hot Trends
• Google Insights for Search: “Rising searches” for last 7 days
  (also check the rising searches for specific terms)
• Google News (left sidebar: see Top Stories; click on category names or more)
• Yahoo! Search Clues
• Yahoo Buzz Index
• Bing xRank (discontinued)
• Bing Top Image Searches
  (click on an image to see top search queries associated with it)
• AOL Search Trends
• Ask.com IQ (no longer updated?)

Blog Search

• IceRocket: Popular (left sidebar)
• BlogPulse Featured Trends
• Technorati Popular

(“currently unavailable….will return in near future”)

• Google Blog Search: Hot Queries (removed from right sidebar)

Real-time / Social Search

• Bing Social: Hottest Social Topics (left sidebar)
• Social Mention: Trends
• Addict-o-matic: Hot Topics
• 48ers – Trending Topics
• surcher
• Viral Heat: Social Trends (only for select topics)
• Sency (filter by 32 major cities)

Twitter

• Twitter home page (right sidebar; can refine by location)
• Twitter Search: Trending Topics
• Trendistic (right sidebar)
• Topsy (home page and Trending page)
• What the Trend
• Twitscoop: Hot Trends (click on link in top navigation)
• TweetMeme
• Twemes

Facebook

• FacePINCH: Facebook Trends
• ItsTrending.com
• Like Button (view popular content in multiple categories)

Other Social Media

• YouTube Trends
• Digg: Popular Last 24 hours (other time intervals possible)
• SocialBlade (Digg)
• Reddit: Top Scoring Links Today (other time intervals possible)
• Delicious Hotlist and Popular
• POPURLs

UPDATE:
For more tools, particularly for the UK, check out Malcolm Coles’ post on news and search trend tools.

Related posts:

1. Google Trends Graphs No Longer Embedded in Search Results?
2. Search Trend Optimization for Evergreen Content
3. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends

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 Not Always So Great at Favoring Original Sources
2. Google News Now Recrawling Updated Articles
3. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?

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. Do Google’s Expanded Domain Results Apply to News and Video Listings?
3. Rich Snippets: Increase Google Visibility for Reviews through Microformats

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. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic
3. Survey: Twitter Less than 1% of Traffic to Newspapers and Magazines; Facebook 1%

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 Optimization Tips
2. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
3. Google News Not Always So Great at Favoring Original Sources

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. Do Google’s Expanded Domain Results Apply to News and Video Listings?
2. Google News Not Always So Great at Favoring Original Sources
3. Article Highlights: Good for Users, Good for Search Engines

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. Pew Research News Survey: Findings on Search Engines, Social Networks and Twitter
2. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
3. Great Example of a Multimedia News Article from ESPN.com

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:

(2010 Update: The syndicated article no longer appears on Yahoo News so I removed the link to it. When this post was written it appeared at: news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/amazonriverdatedto11millionyearsold)

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. The Wrap, Newser and Content Aggregation: How Much Attribution is Enough?

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. Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining
2. Real-time Search Optimization for News Sites
3. 5 Ways to Deal with Seasonal Dips in Search Engine Traffic

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 that 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. JVC Facebook Page Sweepstakes a Big Success. But Does it Violate Facebook Guidelines?
2. Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?
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 Now Recrawling Updated Articles
2. Google News Not Always So Great at Favoring Original Sources
3. Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?

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 Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?
2. Google Trends Graphs No Longer Embedded in Search Results?
3. Does Social Media Increase a Journalist’s Value?

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. Should Browsers Display Only Canonical URLs to Users?