Getting articles on Google’s News search engine can be quite tricky for any website with a news section. If your site isn’t a well established publisher of news articles like the various industry and online newspaper sites, Google is often likely to completely ignore your news posts.
And even known news sites always have to make sure that they incorporate the relevant keywords related to the story just so Google will index and publish. It was an annoying obstacle, as journalists had to make SEO and keyword considerations when putting articles together, which might have compromised readability and integrity.
Now Google has finally released a meta keyword tag for all articles related to news that a publisher wants listed under Google News. Essentially giving writer the freedom they needed. Although Google warns that this won’t be some easy ranking spam technique either.
How it Works
A public statement from Google said that the ranking update was introduced primarily to give writers the liberty to write on any given topic in any manner they want without having to specifically mention the exact related keyword in the content, thereby improving the type of publications they exposed users to.
So for example, if a publisher wanted to include an article on rhino poaching in South Africa. The title or content wouldn’t need to specifically mention the keyphrase ‘rhino poaching’ but could use different synonyms or metaphors instead that humans would understand but search engine algorithms couldn’t necessarily interpret.
They just need to include: meta name=”news_keywords” content=”rhino poaching south africa” in the articles meta-tag and Google will use that search signal instead.
Better Quality News Articles
This move will hopefully really increase the standard of news articles we find on the internet. They can be more entertainingly written, and we might begin to get exposed to news sources that were previously excluded from Google News before this.
It won’t be a way for poor quality news sites to just suddenly begin ranking well on the news search engine though. The meta-tag is only a single signal, the other ones won’t suddenly be discounted. It’s more just a way to let Google know that what you’re publishing is news and what it’s about. You’ll still need to write quality articles and publish them on a well optimised site.