The Most Common Technical SEO Issues for News Publishers

Slides from my talk at the 2025 News Reach conference in Dortmund, where I spoke about the most common technical SEO issues affecting news and publishing websites.

Transcript

1. The Most Common Technical SEO Issues for News Publishers Barry Adams 24 October 2025
2. Barry Adams ➢ Active in SEO since 1998 ➢ Specialist in SEO for News Publishers ➢ Newsletter: SEOforGoogleNews.com ➢ Co-founder of the News & Editorial SEO Summit
3. I’ve Worked With…
4. What is Technical SEO?
5. Google’s model Crawl Queue Crawling Processing Index Render Queue Rendering Index Index Serving Rendered HTML URL HTML
6. Crawling Crawl Queue Crawling Processing Index Render Queue Rendering Index Index Serving Rendered HTML URL HTML Indexing Ranking
7. Technical SEO is… … all aspects of SEO that are focused on the technical aspects of a website that enable crawling, indexing, and ranking of webpages in search results. Everything to do with SEO that’s not content or marketing/brand.
8. Crawl Issues
9. Server response time
10. Server response time • Fast response = more pages crawled • Optimal is < 200ms; ➢ Very hard to achieve ➢ ‘Good enough’: < 600ms
11. Example of wasted URLs 8% Indexable 41% Canonicalised 51% Redirects 1 million URL Sitebulb crawl of a news publishing website
12. Redirects
13. Redirects cause crawl waste https://www.website.com/page https://www.website.com/page/ Browser plugin: Link Redirect Trace
14. Internal links should never redirect • Some redirects are unavoidable; ➢ Old URLs should redirect to new URLs to preserve inbound links • But internal links should always point directly to final destination URLs; ➢ Minimise crawl waste on redirected URLs
15. Canonicalised pages
16. Canonical tags don’t solve crawl waste <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.website.com/page"/> • Google crawls the alternative URLs, only then to be informed it’s not allowed to index them; ➢ Still consumes crawl effort • Use canonicalisation wisely
17. Common sources of canonicalised URLs • Internal tracking parameters; https://www.website.com/news/article-123?recommended=1 • Sorted & Filtered lists • Printer-friendly versions • Pagination • …
18. Index Issues
19. Google’s model Crawl Queue Crawling Processing Index Render Queue Rendering Index Index Serving Rendered HTML URL HTML
20. Indexing and rendering Render Queue Rendering Crawl Queue Crawling Processing Index Index Index URL HTML Rendering takes time, and news doesn’t have time. News article indexing is initially with raw HTML only.
21. With or without JavaScript
22. Don’t rely on client-side JavaScript • All critical content should be in the HTML response • Google will eventually render the page and see JS-loaded content; ➢ However, this can be a delayed process ➢ The article is relatively old by then ➢ Google strongly prefers fresh articles in Top Stories & Google News
23. Pagination is almost always done wrong • Wrong implementations: ➢ Infinite scroll ➢ Client-side JavaScript ➢ Paginated series canonicalised to the 1st page <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.website.com/category/" /> Load More Articles Google doesn’t perform actions No clicking or scrolling
24. Why do we want indexable pagination? • A section / category / tag page collects articles around a specific topic; ➢ More articles = more topic authority ➢ We want Google to see a decent body of journalism on specific topics to show you are an expert on those topics
25. Correct pagination • Crawlable links to page 2 & beyond; ➢Each page canonicalised to itself <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.website.com/category/?page=2" /> • Limit pagination to preserve crawl budget; ➢ Supplement with an article archive ➢ This enables discoverability of older articles • Example: TechRadar.com
26. Semantic HTML
27. Semantic HTML helps indexing • HTML generated by JS-frameworks often lacks semantic tags • Use the most appropriate HTML tag for every element; ➢ This helps Google identify the important aspects of the page ➢ Also critical for accessibility
28. Structured data • Standard articles: Article / NewsArticle • Live articles: LiveBlogPosting • Reviews: Review • Author pages: Person / ProfilePage • Homepage: NewsMediaOrganization • Others: FactCheck / FAQ / Event / Q&A / …
29. Common mistake: Featured image
30. Common mistakes: Featured image • Featured image in Article SD is the wrong size & aspect ratio; ➢ Ideally, SD defines 3 images: -16:9 (1200 x 675) -4:3 (1200 x 900) -1:1 (1200 x 1200) • Too many images; ➢ In my experience, too many images defined in the Article SD confuses Google ➢ Keep it to three – no more, no less ➢ If you have just one image, make it the 16:9 version
31. Keep your SD snippets lean • No need for elaborate structured data code; ➢ Google doesn’t rely heavily on linked SD ➢ Include only the recommended attributes according to Google’s documentation
32. Rank Issues
33. Core web vitals • Objective metrics designed to emulate subjective experience • Not a big direct ranking factor
34. Core web vitals & engagement • Google measures click signals; ➢ Feeds directly into their rankings • Bad CWV = bad usability; ➢ Bad usability = negative click signals Img credit: https://www.mariehaynes.com/navboost/
35. Don’t obsess over ‘perfect’ CWV • At some point it’s ‘good enough’ • Mostly green with some yellow & red is fine; ➢ It doesn’t need to be perfect
36. Technical SEO for LLMs
37. Two aspects to LLM optimisation 1. Training data ingestion; ➢ Ensuring your content can be extracted and ingested by LLMs for training purposes 2. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG); ➢ Ensuring your URLs are cited as sources in LLM answers
38. 1. Training data ingestion • LLMs crawl and scrape the web; ➢ Content is extracted and tokenised Img credit: https://yaelgomez.substack.com/p/how-llms-see-the-world-the-magic
39. 1. Training data ingestion Optimisation tactics: ➢ Semantic HTML to aid extraction ➢ All content in the HTML (no client-side JavaScript)
40. 2. RAG citation • LLMs perform searches in the background to ‘ground’ answers and provide citations; ➢ ‘Query fan-out’ to capture a broad range of relevant pages ➢ Top ranked pages are cited more often
41. 2. RAG citation Optimisation tactics: ➢ Top ranked webpages for related keywords and topics ➢ Content ‘chunking’ to structure your webpages ➢ Structured data for additional relevancy
42. Summarised
43. Technical SEO isn’t complicated… …but it can be hard. • Make things easy for Google; ➢ URLs are sacred ➢ Be careful with canonicalisation ➢ Load all content in the HTML ➢ Make your pagination indexable ➢ Use semantic HTML tags ➢ Short & focused structured data ➢ Correct image sizes for Google
44. Technical SEO for LLMs… …is technical SEO. GEO AEO LLMO S E O
45. https://www.seoforgooglenews.com/
46. Thank You barry@polemicdigital.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryadams/ https://www.SEOforGoogleNews.com/