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.

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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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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

* Article Titles in Google News

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. Google News Optimization Tips
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