Truths about Google News could affect editorial policy
April 2nd, 2008 — Andy KruseThe official Google News blog did a post today to confirm/deny some truths/rumors about how it indexes and ranks stories.
It’s important to note that these learnings apply only to Google News results, not to Google Web results. (Here at Internet Broadcasting, the Web:News referral ratio for our sites is about 25:1.) Still, Google News accounts for a lot of traffic, and it’s something for which we optimize and about which we school our editors.
Most notable to me in this post:
1. Google News only visits a story once. It never comes back to check for updates. (The Google Web spiders, of course, will return.) This could bite local publishers in the treatment of developing news, when it might be easier to rewrite an existing story, rather than create a new one. For example, your site may say Barbaro is dead, but your Google News snippet will forever read that the horse is merely ailing.
Our recommendation would be that if the news significantly changes — headline and nut graph — it’s best to create a new story with a new URL and link to the previous one(s) for context.
2. Being first doesn’t matter. Rather, it only matters for the first minute, if you’re the exclusive. After that, Google’s looking for the best story, and it shows no preference to who published first (or most recently).
Combining those two points, editors might want to change their behavior in certain situations. We’ve long encouraged them to “just get something up,” even if it’s one sentence and a tease for readers to stay tuned. Now knowing that Google News could lock in a publisher to its original headline and incomplete story body, we might change our thinking. If those third and fourth paragraphs are only going to take a minute, it might be worth the wait.
The rest of Google’s major points:
Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH
Articles that are just images or video won’t be included TRUE
There’s no way to see why my articles weren’t included in Google News MYTH
Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH
Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE
If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:18 pm
[…] Andy Kruse at State of Local highlighted a couple observations from the announcement that are important to take away: 1) Google News only visits a story once. It never comes back to check for updates … Our recommendation would be that if the news significantly changes — headline and nut graph — it’s best to create a new story with a new URL and link to the previous one(s) for context. […]
April 4th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
This just shows how challenging it is to find the right point to move from updating the story and creating a new version.
If you want people to link to the piece (or want people linking to it already not to link to an older version), it pays to keep the original URL.
But as you note, not creating a new version with a new URL can penalize you with Google News.