Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

You don’t have to wait months or years to get high rankings in Google. Through Google News, you can instantly shoot up to page 1 of Google.

Now Google already gives you a set of guidelines, but here is what I found is effective:

1. You have to write news worthy content – if you are struggling to find news content you can go to Google Trends or any popular news site to see what’s hot.

2. Create a Google News Sitemap – through the Yoast SEO plugin you can create a sitemap. This way when you have news worthy content they will pick it up faster.

3. Your URL structure has to be unique – if you don’t have news related keywords within your URL you are less likely to rank. By having specific keywords you will shoot up to the top for news related queries.

In addition to that, follow the guidelines Google News gives and you will be fine.

In two recent posts, I asked what Google could do for news — and vice versa. Now I’ll pose the question about Facebook.

The core of the problem and the opportunity is similar for both: Google and Facebook know more about publishers’ readers than they do. Both services also know more about publishers’ content than they do. So now I’ll ask: Is there a way to share some of that information — or to use the scare word, data — to the benefit of all three parties involved: first the user, then the services and the news organizations?

Google is under pressure especially in Europe, starting with German publishers, then the French, and lately the Spanish, each using their political clout to box the giant in — and it’s working. Google is now in a mood to make friends with the news business and that’s why I wrote those posts, to suggest what I thought could lead to the beginning of a meaningful friendship....

Scribes everywhere, look alive: Google is now funding a project which will use AI to write automated news stories,

The Press Association, a UK news agency, received about $807,000 from the third round of Google’s Digital News Initiative funding. Their project? Reporters and Data and Robots, or RADAR, an AI/human collaborative news site which will produce “a daily diet of compelling stories.”

RADAR is listed on the DNI site as a “large” project, with a goal towards providing a steady stream of ready-made content for smaller news sites....

Google announced that it will now label fact-checking articles with the new Fact Check tag in Google News on the web and in the Google News & Weather application on iOS and Android. The tag will help users access fact-checking articles related to major news stories, starting in the U.S. and the U.K.

With this update, when users tap the arrow to see more about a particular news story, in addition to seeing associated articles labeled with tags such as “Opinion” and “In-Depth,” they may also see associated articles marked with the Fact Check tag. Users can tap these articles to read fact-checking information associated with the original story.

In a blog post, Richard Gingras, head of news at Google, explained:

Google News determines whether an article might contain fact checks in part by looking for the schema.org ClaimReview markup. We also look for sites that follow the commonly accepted criteria for fact checks. Publishers who create fact-checks and would like to see it appear with the “Fact Check” tag should use that markup in fact-check articles. For more information, head on over to our help center....

Back in December, Google News was granted its second continuation patent in ten years, giving the layman some insight into the search giant’s algorithm, and how it chooses which articles to feature.

...The Claims section of the latest version of Google News’ patent shows a shift away from the traditional signals of a news source’s importance. Now rather than where a story is being reported, it is how a story is being reported both online and off that makes a difference in terms of ranking.

These signals, per the patent, include:

- How quickly an event happened before publication of an article about it took place,

- The “usage pattern regarding traffic associated with the source” means that the search engine is looking at things such as how many people click upon a link to specific articles from the source, monitoring traffic to articles from a source to see how often people click (or don’t click) on links to particular articles from individual sources.

They tell us in the patent: “Well known sites, such as CNN, tend to be preferred to less popular sites, such as Unknown Town News, which users may avoid. The traffic measured may be normalized by the number of opportunities readers had of visiting the link to avoid biasing the measure due to the ranking preferences of the news search engine.”...