The State of SEO for Google News

Slides from my talk at the Glide Publishing event in December 2022 where I gave an overview of the state of SEO for news publishers, with a focus on best practices for technical SEO and editorial SEO for Google News.

Transcript

1. The Current State of Google News SEO Barry Adams December 2022
2. Barry Adams ➢ Doing SEO since 1998 ➢ Specialist in Technical SEO & News SEO ➢ Newsletter: SEOforGoogleNews.com
3. I’ve Worked With… https://www.polemicdigital.com/about/clients/
4. Google Giveth, and Google Taketh Away…
12. What you can do? • Nothing.
13. Or can we..?
15. Web Search Engines Crawling Indexing Ranking
16. The Three Pillars of SEO Technology Relevancy Authority
17. Relation to Web Search Technology Crawling Relevancy Indexing Authority Ranking
18. Technical SEO
19. Optimise for efficient crawling
20. Optimise Crawling • Server Response Time
22. Optimise Core Web Vitals
25. The Great AMP Deletion
26. https://kurtgessler.medium.com/what-happened-when-we-disabled- google-amp-at-tribune-publishing-2fa65a2f2a40
27. Google has removed AMP from documentation
29. Caveat: You need good Core Web Vitals
30. Optimise for Article Extraction
31. Indexing = Extraction + Semantics
32. Extraction Can Google easily extract an article’s content from its HTML?
33. Semantics Can Google understand what the page is about?
34. Editorial SEO
35. Optimise Headlines • Title: <title>This is the article title</title> • Page Heading: • SD ‘headline’:
36. Optimise intros/summaries/ledes
37. Optimise internal linking
38. https://www.seoforgooglenews.com/p/internal-linking-topic-pages
39. Optimise URLs
40. https://www.seoforgooglenews.com/p/everything-urls-news-publishers
41. Quality & Authority Signals
42. E-A-T
43. E-A-T in Action • Define authors; ➢ Author pages with bio, social media links, schema.org/Person markup • Focus on editorial specialities; ➢ Don’t try to be everything to everyone - Unless you’re one of the big national publishers • Separate news from opinion; ➢ Google wants to rank ‘unbiased’ news
44. NewsGuard
45. Wrapping up…
46. Success in Google News 1. Enabling fast crawling & indexing; ✓ Strong technical foundations 2. Optimise your output; ✓ Editorial best practices 3. Build your authority; ✓ E-A-T & topical expertise 4. Don’t worry too much about Google’s algorithms; ✓ They’re impossible to predict
47. https://www.SEOforGoogleNews.com
48. Q&A barry@polemicdigital.com @badams @badams@mastodon.social