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Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?

May 22, 2009 by Adam Sherk

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:

NYTimes.com article link in Google News

NYTimes.com article headline and title tag

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. The Most Common Google News Errors and How to Avoid Them
  2. Article Highlights: Good for Users, Good for Search Engines
  3. Google News Now Recrawling Updated Articles
  4. Do People Search for “Breaking News”?
  5. Foursquare and The New York Times Archive Would Be a Great Match

Comments

  1. Klaus Junginger says

    September 2, 2011 at 6:47 am

    Hi,

    have you seen syndication and original-source meta tags beeing used across the US news industry? Until now, I only saw the Tribune Group using them cross site, some others rather set these meta-tags on their own URLs pointing to themselves, and It´s not clear yet what are the benefits in applying them. Any idea?

    It’s a great site – will drop by more often

    Cheers

    Klaus

  2. Adam Sherk says

    September 2, 2011 at 8:56 am

    Thanks Klaus. So far though those tags haven’t gotten adoption so at this point it doesn’t look like they are going to make a big impact unfortunately.

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About Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is an SEO and PR consultant helping publishers with digital strategy and audience development, including enterprise SEO, public relations and social media marketing.

Adam is VP SEO and Digital Strategy for Define Media Group.

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