Blog Post

Google News Is Giving More Control to News Publishers


Google released that they will be giving more control to news publishers. Chad and Adam thought that this would be a great time to discuss this Google News update. Watch today’s Daily Brown Bag to learn about Google News and its pretty strict standards, what Google considers to be worthy of its Google News area, how Google is offering more control to news publishers and more insights on Google News.

Also available on YouTube.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello and welcome to The Daily Brown Bag. Today we are going to be talking about some recent updates that Google has made to their publishing center. I am Chad Hill and I am joined by Adam Stetzer.

Good afternoon Chad. Welcome to the Daily Brown Bag. We are talking about Google News and specifically the publishing center and an announcement that Google has made about some changes there. This is really only applicable, Chad, to U.S. publishers although they do have hopes, Google does, to roll this out to other countries after they've seen that these features really work out. We are talking now for folks who already are a verified Google News source and are probably familiar with the publisher center features. Maybe not everybody is, Chad, so let's just back up a second here and talk about the goals are and why Google is doing this.

Their goal here is to provide a platform where publishers and Google can work better together to connect users with the most relevant and diverse content possible which sounds very much to the mission of their search in general, but here we are talking specifically about Google News and where people log in who are verified Google News source and can control certain aspects about how Google digests their content before syndication. In this announcement, Chad, and I will ask you to go into it a little more, but they are specially talking about how publishers can update the name of their site. How they can update source categories, how they can rename sections of their site. Let's help our audience out a little bit. What does that really mean and why is it important?

The first one I think you would want to understand is what is The Google News and how do you get in it? There are a lot of people have attempted to get into Google News and they have some pretty strict standards. So let's go through those and talk about what Google considers to be worthy of its news area and what's just regular web content or blog content. There are six standards here. One is content from the site. It has to be reporting on timely issues, they have to comply with all standards of journalism as Google defines it. The two things they talk about are that it provides original reporting and honest attribution. The third one is that there is clear accountability in that the reporter and the site are very clearly identified who they are, where they are located, bio's of the author's, etc.

Authority needs to make sure the site has expertise in clear authority, readability, that it is well written, no grammatical errors, easy to navigate, and this last one here to make sure they use meta tags correctly because that is a very important part of the way they consume and display the information. Clearly if you do make it into the news feed, Google gives you some very nice preference not only in your own category of search but also many cases you'll see depending on the topic news results that surface pretty high in the search results. I guess the one other question people very often have is that there are a lot of people that mix in their own editorial content with aggregated or syndicated content and what Google wants you to do is to separate those two things out so that they can very clearly kind of white list one part of that and not the other.

I think at the end of the day, Adam, what we're talking about here is for these more advanced publications that are in the Google News. They are giving you some more control over your information because the last thing you want is after going through an arduous process of getting approved, for you to make a site change and have yourself fall out. I think that is really what the publishing center is all about but it also gives a little context to the people who are out there who read Google News to understand where this information is really coming from.

Excellent, well changes to the publishing center in the Google News area for verified sites. We definitely would like to hear from those of you who are in Google News, what you think of these changes, pros and cons. Drop us a note. We always ask that you subscribe so we can see you right back here tomorrow for another Daily Brown Bag.
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