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 [...]

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 [...]

(Note: Updated August 2012 – 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]