The State of SEO for Google News

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The Current State of Google News SEO Barry Adams December 2022

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

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

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Google Giveth, and Google Taketh Away…

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What you can do? • Nothing.

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Or can we..?

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Web Search Engines Crawling Indexing Ranking

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The Three Pillars of SEO Technology Relevancy Authority

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Relation to Web Search Technology Crawling Relevancy Indexing Authority Ranking

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Technical SEO

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Optimise for efficient crawling

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Optimise Crawling • Server Response Time

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Optimise Core Web Vitals

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The Great AMP Deletion

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

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Google has removed AMP from documentation

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Caveat: You need good Core Web Vitals

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Optimise for Article Extraction

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Indexing = Extraction + Semantics

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

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Semantics Can Google understand what the page is about?

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Editorial SEO

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

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Optimise intros/summaries/ledes

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Optimise internal linking

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

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Optimise URLs

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

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Quality & Authority Signals

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E-A-T

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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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NewsGuard

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Wrapping up…

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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