Google News Optimization Tips

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)

the video:  

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 Articlesfor 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.

MEDIA INSIGHT The Top 14 Video Services for Publishers and Brands

Words are cheap; and if you’re a millennial, they are also very, very boring. What youngsters want these days is video. Lots and lots of video. They want to consume content via video; create their own videos; and share videos across multiple social platforms.

Snapchat’s MyStory and Instagram’s Hyperlapse have taken off like wildfire, but they are merely the tip of the wildfire iceberg. The statistics for internet users’ hunger for video content is undeniable: YouTube gets more than 1 billion unique users per month; and now the video-hosting site can deliver stats to marketers (or any content creator) in real time, and that’s just the beginning.

Launched way back in 2005, YouTube seems like almost ancient history, or some sort of utility, like the water company of the Internet. There are all kinds of places that are serving video content to users that have nothing to do with YouTube or its family of Google-owned sites. In fact, Facebook comes in at a strong second behind Google, with a steep drop-off before getting to AOL and Yahoo. For good or bad, we are all being served more video content than ever before, just as high-quality video content is becoming easier and easier to create with mobile devices, which brings us back to Hyperlapse and MyStory.

Here’s a quick rundown on all the great new video-making toys that are trying to win the eyeballs in the new Internet video game:

http://instagram.com/p/sK2peBAaEl/embed/captioned/?v=2

Instagram Hyperlapse — So simple, yet apparently not-so-easy to have engineered: Hyperlapse allows users to take pro-quality stop-motion video to compress the time of a skateboard trick, or traffic over a bridge, or a sunset from an airplane window. Although Hyperlapse has become instantly popular, it is up for some immediate competition with a similar feature on the Apple iOS 8update.

Timehop — It’s hard to think about, but social media has been around for, like, years. Timehop takes the ephemera of your old Twitter posts (and Facebook and Instagram and…) and lets you know what you were doing this day last year, two years ago, what have you. Timehop gives historical weight to your recycled social media posts of yore.

SnapChat Story — The good folks at Snapchat decided to make a platform for stories, where you can host your snaps for 24 hours to tell your special story. Most people who want to save their Snaps save them on another social platform like Facebook or Tumblr, but if you want to string a few Snaps together for about a day, now you can with Snapchat Stories.

http://vine.co/v/h1Yz2Bad73K/embed/simple

Vine — Vine is to Twitter what Hyperlapse is to Instagram, although now that Vine isn’t the next big thing, what do we need with six seconds of looping video anymore? In the ever-evolving world of social media platforms, it’s be new or go home… but maybe with these new camera tools and editing options, Vine won’t have to go home.

Lightt — That’s Lightt with two T’s. It bills itself as a semi-pro video production app with in-app editing and music features. If you’re serious about video production, this app is worth checking out.

Vyclone — Taking mobile video production to the next level, Vyclone allows you to produce multi-camera videos with no break in the audio, as long as you can wade through a few of its non-intuitive editing features.

One Second Epic — By epic, One Second Epic means that it’s like Vine, but for 10-second videos instead of just six.

Evergram — If Timehop is the ghost of social media past, the Evergram is the ghost of social media future: it’s an app geared for leaving keepsake videos for later, even years to come.

YesVideo — Remember home movies? There was once a TV show that featured the funny ones. A new service called YesVideo allows you to easily upload and share the videos that you might have on VHS video or Super-8 film. Order DVDs and share on Facebook! Thanks, YesVideo.

Animoto — You add the photos and music, and Animoto will create seamless video slideshows with your pre-existing photo and music content.

Directr — Directr, a video production tool in the same class as Lightt and Vyclone, was the one that was acquired by Google’s YouTube, so expect Directr to be the next-generation industry standard for in-phone video editing and production.

GoPro — OK, so GoPro, as you know, is the craziest video camera ever made for the craziest people who make the craziest video with it, which is now the content that the company uses to market not just the camera, but the videos themselves and the lifestyles that support them. Just look at GoPro’s YouTube channel if you have any doubts. Then again, it can make your dog’s eye videos look pretty awesome too – like this one that has been viewed 13 million times.

Ocho — It’s 8-second videos. Ocho! Get it? Eight seconds! Of video! And it supports timelapse, filters and lots of other cool effects to make any video look special.

Storehouse — Seamlessly combine videos and photos and text into stories withStorehouse. It won an Apple Design Award for visual storytelling, so that can’t be bad.

Google is making a giant change this week that could crush millions of small businesses

On Tuesday, April 21, Google is making a major update to its mobile search algorithm that will change the order in which websites are ranked when users search for something from their phone.

The algorithm will start favoring mobile-friendly websites (ones with large text, easy-to-click links, and that resize to fit whatever screen they’re viewed on) and ranking them higher in search. Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly will get demoted.

About 60% of online traffic now comes from mobile and Google wants users to have a good experience whenever they click on a mobile link.

The company announced its impending changes back in February, giving webmasters nearly two months and plenty of information to make the changes necessary to keep their sites from disappearing from mobile search results. But the update is still expected to cause a major ranking shake-up. It has even been nicknamed “Mobile-geddon” because of how “apocalyptic” it could be for millions of websites, Itai Sadan, CEO of website building company Duda, told Business Insider.

“I think the people who are at risk are those who don’t know about it,” Sadan says. To him, that mostly means small businesses.

“Come April 21, a lot of small businesses are going to be really surprised that the number of visitors to their websites has dropped significantly. This is going to affect millions of sites on the web,” he says.

Businesses that depend on people finding them through localized search — like, if someone typed “coffee shops in Sunnyside, Queens,” into Google on their phone — could see a decrease in foot traffic as a result of this update, Sadan says.

“Google has always been about relevancy, and content is king,” he says. “But that’s changing. Yes, they’re saying content is still extremely important, but user experience is just as important. It’s not sufficient to have all the right content — if people come to your site and the content is there but it’s not readable, that’s not good.”

It’s not only small businesses that are going to be affected by mobile-geddon though.

Marketing company Somo released a study last week that found that a bunch of big brands, like American Apparel, The Daily Mail, and Ryanair, will all get punished when the change takes place, unless they update their sites before Tuesday.

Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-mobilegeddon-2015-4?r=US#ixzz3XwnrYNMB