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
   

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2. Barry Adams
   ➢ Doing SEO since 1998
   ➢ Specialist in Technical SEO & News SEO
   ➢ Newsletter: SEOforGoogleNews.com
   

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3. I’ve Worked With…
   https://www.polemicdigital.com/about/clients/
   

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4. Google Giveth, and Google
   Taketh Away…
   

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12. What you can do?
    • Nothing.
    

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13. Or can we..?
    

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15. Web Search Engines
    Crawling Indexing Ranking
    

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16. The Three Pillars of SEO
    Technology
    Relevancy
    Authority
    

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17. Relation to Web Search
    Technology Crawling
    Relevancy Indexing
    Authority Ranking
    

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18. Technical SEO
    

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19. Optimise for efficient crawling
    

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20. Optimise Crawling
    • Server Response Time
    

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22. Optimise Core Web Vitals
    

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25. The Great AMP Deletion
    

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26. https://kurtgessler.medium.com/what-happened-when-we-disabled-
    google-amp-at-tribune-publishing-2fa65a2f2a40
    

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27. Google has removed AMP from documentation
    

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29. Caveat: You need good Core Web Vitals
    

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30. Optimise for Article Extraction
    

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31. Indexing
    =
    Extraction + Semantics
    

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32. Extraction
    Can Google easily extract an
    article’s content from its HTML?
    

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33. Semantics
    Can Google understand what
    the page is about?
    

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34. Editorial SEO
    

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35. Optimise Headlines
    • Title: This is the article title
    • Page Heading:
    • SD ‘headline’:
    

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36. Optimise intros/summaries/ledes
    

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37. Optimise internal linking
    

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38. https://www.seoforgooglenews.com/p/internal-linking-topic-pages
    

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39. Optimise URLs
    

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40. https://www.seoforgooglenews.com/p/everything-urls-news-publishers
    

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41. Quality & Authority Signals
    

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42. E-A-T
    

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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
    

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44. NewsGuard
    

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45. Wrapping up…
    

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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
    

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47. https://www.SEOforGoogleNews.com
    

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48. Q&A
    barry@polemicdigital.com
    @badams
    @badams@mastodon.social
    

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