Posts tagged as:

Google

Google Buzz and News Sites: Good Potential But Facebook Still the Better Play

February 17, 2010

Google Buzz has certainly gotten a lot of attention in the past week be it for privacy concerns, suggestions for improvements or its “Code Red” push to get things right. But at this early stage, how strong are the marketing opportunities for news sites?
Sharing and discussing content is a key component of Google Buzz, so [...]

Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?

December 16, 2009

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 [...]

Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?

December 8, 2009

Today Google unveiled its Living Stories prototype, showcasing its vision of a new format for presenting news stories online. Essentially the idea is that for ongoing stories news organizations would maintain a single, consistent “living” URL that is continually updated with the latest developments.
Google has been collaborating with The New York Times and The Washington [...]

I Hope News Corp Does Block its Content from Google

November 23, 2009

More developments in the Rupert Murdoch vs. Google saga today, as the Financial Times reports that discussions have taken place between News Corp and Microsoft on an exclusive deal with Bing that would lead to News Corp blocking its news sites (such as The Wall Street Journal) from Google.

Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?

October 29, 2009

This week Google unveiled Google Social Search, an opt-in feature that provides additional search results with content from a user’s “social circle” of friends and trusted sources. A limited number of listings will appear at the bottom of the main search result pages, or users can drill down to see more extensive listings:

Currently a social [...]

Google News Optimization Tips

September 3, 2009

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 [...]

Do People Search for “Breaking News”?

June 9, 2009

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 [...]

Google JavaScript Changes Put Publishers in Violation of Sponsored Link Guidelines

June 5, 2009

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

Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?

May 22, 2009

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 [...]

Rich Snippets: Increase Google Visibility for Reviews through Microformats

May 13, 2009

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 [...]