Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg.
Hi, I'm Cherry Prommawin.
We're both Search Advocates at Google.
We're here to talk about best practices for new sites.
In this video,
we'll talk about how you can position your content
to appear on Google Search results
and News surfaces.
We'll provide some ideas
that will help you increase the visibility of your content on Search
and drive more traffic to your website.
Also, be sure to check out another video we did
on Search Console for news websites.
It has a lot of tips on analyzing your performance on Search,
which I think can be helpful for you to take actions
for more success on Search.
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Let's start with clarifying
the different ways your content can be featured on Google.
Your news content can appear in Google Search results
as text,
image,
video,
or other types of results.
In a little bit, we will talk about
SEO best practices for news websites.
There are also two key places
where Google News content can appear in Google Search.
These are Top Stories and the News tab.
That's why later on, we will also talk about
how to be eligible for news services.
[whooshes]
There are four common types of Search result elements.
You can influence most of them.
Check the links in the description to learn more about how to do it.
First, a text result
that's based on the text of the page.
Second, rich results include one or more attributes
with additional information about the page,
such as frequently asked questions
or how-to steps.
Third, image results are based on an image
that's embedded on a page.
And fourth, a video result is based on a video
that's embedded on a page.
The best way to decide where to invest your efforts
is to understand what works best for your audience.
Check what your data says.
We discussed how to do it
in the Search Console for News video.
To complete the picture,
like we said before,
there are two more things
specifically relevant to news organizations.
For these two features,
you will need to be eligible for Google News.
Google News is a news aggregator service
available on Android, iOS,
and the web at
It displays different product features,
such as headlines
and personalized recommendations.
How to be eligible?
We'll talk about that later.
The first feature is the Top Stories carousel.
This is a Search feature
that displays relevant and high-quality news content.
The layout of the carousel can change
based on many factors, such as user's query,
device, and location.
Second, the News tab on Google Search.
These Google Search results are narrowed down
to focus on news-related results.
It's also important to note
that this is different from Google News.
Let's go into SEO tips for news websites.
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The Google Search Essentials include the core parts
of what makes your web-based content eligible
to appear and perform well on Google Search.
Let me cherry pick the key best practices
that can be especially important for news websites.
Google systems
are designed to present content that is helpful,
reliable,
and is primarily created for people,
not search engines.
Our documentation provides a list of questions
that can help you assess your content
in these three areas.
After identifying relevant content,
Google systems prioritize it.
To do this,
they use a mix of factors that can help define
which content demonstrate aspects of experience,
expertise,
authoritativeness,
and trustworthiness,
or what we call EEAT.
News organizations often do that really well,
but here's some more detail about them.
Experience shows the extent
to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand
or life experience for the topic.
For example, if you're looking for product reviews,
you'd probably want content from people
that have used the product
or have experience within that subject.
Expertise shows the extent
to which the content creator has the necessary knowledge
or skill for the topic.
For example, if you're looking for health advice,
you'd probably want content written by physicians
or researchers.
Authoritativeness shows the extent
to which the content creator or the website
is known as a go-to source for the topic.
For example, if you're looking to renew your passport,
the official government page
will be the most authoritative source for this content.
Trust is the most important member of EEAT.
Even if the content creator is highly experienced,
expert, and authoritative,
a financial scam will always be untrustworthy.
Check out the links on screen
for more details on how to assess your content.
[Cherry] Provide a publication date to Google
following the byline dates guidelines.
This helps Google identify when a page was published
or significantly updated.
Use structured data
to specify a date and time zone
to help our crawler better understand your article dates.
For a news article page that gets significant update,
modify the article date
and label the dates with text like "posted,"
"published,"
"updated," or "last updated."
You can also use the
Whenever possible,
prevent other dates from appearing on the page.
For example,
if you show related stories at the end of the page,
make sure the dates are not displayed.
Check out the link on the screen for more details.
Your website structure can be important
for ongoing news stories.
For example, Olympic games or elections.
Some sites use the same page
for different story updates,
while others publish multiple pages for the same story.
Google does not prefer any method.
Here are some tips for each.
If you use the same page for updates to a story,
provide dates with the time zone
and follow the byline dates guidelines
Cherry just mentioned.
Avoid updating a story
without adding significant information.
If you use multiple pages for updates to a story,
make sure the page is linked to each other effectively
and contain a timestamp
or publishing dates.
For example,
you could create a hub page for the story
and link to each new piece from there.
Last but not least,
images and videos are a big part of news content.
Check out the Search Central links in the description
to learn more about image best practices
and video best practices.
For news,
make sure that you are using images
relevant to the news article
and avoid using logos or watermarks that are too big,
making the images hard to understand.
Also,
instead of embedding important information in images,
make sure that the important information
is accessible and crawlable in text format as well.
[whooshes]
To show up in Top Stories or the News tab,
you need to be eligible for Google News.
How do you become eligible?
Good news.
Content across the web is automatically considered.
What appears in Google News
is content that meets three key criteria:
high levels of EEAT,
consistent history of producing news-related content,
and following the Google News policies.
A key part of the policies is transparency.
This means that you're providing clear dates,
information about the authors,
publication, and publisher.
Visitors to your site want to know
who writes the content they read.
Daniel mentioned the news policy.
One of those guidelines I'd like to highlight
is that advertising and other promotional material
should not exceed your news content.
It's also important that you make it clear
what's paid placement and what's not.
When thinking about monetization,
don't forget the user experience.
For example,
avoid having pop-ups or excessive ads,
which might annoy your users
or slow down pages.
If you have outgoing links in your content,
you might want to tell Google about relationship with the linked pages.
To do that,
you can use
such as
Check out the outbound links best practices.
If you leave spammy,
paid,
or user-generated content links on your site
without tagging them,
it could lead to a violation of Google's spam policies.
If you decide to implement a meter,
a paywall,
or a login wall,
use the appropriate structured data.
This helps Google differentiate paywalled content from cloaking,
which violates our spam policy as well.
If you want the content to be searchable,
make sure that we can crawl
and index the content behind the paywall.
[whooshes]
Wow, that was a lot!
I know, and there's still a lot more to come, Daniel.
We didn't even mention Search Console yet.
Oh, no, we forgot!
Yeah! How could you?
Anyway, I need some rest.
This video is too long already.
We have another video
dedicated to Search Console for News Sites
to learn how to use Search Console to analyze sites' performance.
Check that out.
Sounds good to me!
Don't forget to subscribe
to the Google Search Central YouTube channel
to be the first to watch our future Search videos.
You can also check the Google News Initiative website
for more lessons and videos
to help news organizations succeed in the digital world.
Stay tuned!
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