Posts Tagged ‘Google News’

• +1 integrated into Google News

  Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

  

  Google – a popular platform for search engine marketing initiatives – has revealed that Google News is now functional with the +1 feature, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.

  Users browsing Google News when logged into either their Gmail or Google+ accounts will be able to +1 featured content.

  Content that has been +1′d will work in a similar way to that on a standard Google search – which sees shared content promoted higher up on an SERP (search engine results page).

  However, whereas content that has been tweeted will also feature higher on a Google SERP, SEW has suggested that this won’t be the case with Google News.

  It has also been revealed that promoted content won’t always feature at the top of the SERP, according to SEW.

  Whilst Google’s +1 feature is gaining considerable momentum – having been integrated into a number of the search engine giant’s functions – it isn’t yet clear whether +1 will have an overall impact on how stories rank in Google News.

  News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.

  Tags: +1, Google, Google News
  Posted in Search Engine News

• Googlebot all set to crawl Google News web content

  Monday, September 5th, 2011

  

  Google News has undergone a recent SEO change, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.

  The service will now utilise the commonly-used Googlebot, rather than using its own dedicated crawler, to inspect newly published content.

  While the change isn’t anything to drastic, – with the basic elements of web crawling staying the same – Google’s official Webmaster blog has indicated that there will be some minor alterations.

  Googlebot will perform the same task, in the same way, as the former crawl system – Rob D Young writes: “A negative ‘Googlebot-News’ entry in the robots.txt file will still halt just the news crawling, sitemaps will still be crawled, and all analytics for actual visitors will remain the same.”

  More noticeable changes will become clear when examining site logs; now users will only be able to view the Googlebot user-agent – making it much more difficult to be aware of whether your website is being indexed and featured on the Google News feed.

  As expected with this type of change, all guidelines traditionally implemented for Googlebot will apply for news content too – this will mean that pages will not be fully indexed if they require a payment for access.

  News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.

  Tags: Google News, Googlebot, news feeds, search
  Posted in Search Engine Optimisation

• Google News limits

  Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

  From today,  readers of Google news items will find their access limited to 5 items per day from certain sources – the majority of which are those who have been vociferous about search engines carrying their news for free. Announcements by the likes of Rupert Murdoch that Google is profiting from their work, and giving it away for free to people who then avoid paying subscription rates etc have been headlines for several weeks.

  Some media groups have already made the shift to charging for online news content eg Johnston Press, who are charging £5 for a 3 month access to news on their website. It has to be seen how this will succeed in light of the speed that news now breaks on Twitter and so on, from citizen journalists as well as professional sources.

  Is a new model required now that the internet has brought instant news access rather than yesterday’s news in tomorrow’s chip papers? Or will the major media groups find a way of extending the paid model yet further? Only time will tell.

  

  Tags: Google, Google News, limits, News, Rupert Murdoch, search, subscriptions, twitter
  Posted in Google, Stats & Trends

• User Behaviour affects Google news ranking

  Monday, November 16th, 2009

  A recent interview with Josh Cohen, who is Senior Product Manager of Google News, shows how user behaviour can affect ranking in Google News.

  This approach is also used by TrustRank, as part of its complex formulae, and it is inevitable that more and more user behaviour traits are likely to be included in ranking algorithms in future.

  For instance, each user conducting a search is (hopefully!) a human being. Therefore, a user can easily spot from certain clues when a link is inappropriate for their needs. This may be because it is an example of spam (it is big business getting spammy results to the top of the SERPs), or because it is from a publication which the user does not trust or value. It may be that it is irrelevant to their search – common where there are different meanings for terms eg in specialised industry sectors, different cultures and so on.

  Conversely, users may always click on articles from certain publications, or with a certain type of headline, and so on. Google News is aggregating this user behaviour data over time to ensure the news service delivers what searchers are seeking.

  Watch out for more and more user behaviour criteria in all SEO. Build your brand so that users learn to recognise and associate it with quality content. Build your content so that users return over and over again for your opinion. Learn from your own traffic stats. Analyse the popular pages on your site, run multi-variate testing to see what works best for your audience. Listen to your users – surveys, feedback, polls.

  People are fickle – they may not always do what you want or expect, but it is important to remember – the customer (read: website visitor) is always right!

  

  Tags: Google News, search, Search engine results page, user behaviour
  Posted in Google, SEO