517 | News Publishing SEO with Barry Adams

News publishing is always a hot mess when it comes to search engine optimization. We're learning from one of the top SEOs for the news industry. Barry Adams is in the house today on The Edge.

Your weekly digital marketing trends with industry trendsetting guests, powered by inbound link specialist Page One Power. This week's featured guest is Barry Adams, SEO consultant at Polemic Digital. Now here's your host, Aaron Aaron Sparks.

This is Edge of the Web Radio. I'm your host, Aaron Sparks, owner of Site Strategics, a digital marketing firm here in Indianapolis, Indiana. Every week we bring you amazing guests to chat about digital marketing news and tactics. We unpack a key marketing topic for our digital marketing audience. So whether you're part of an agency, a freelancer, or in the marketing department of a firm, this show is for you. So check out all the shows over at edgeofthewebradio.com. That's edgeofthewebradio.com. Edge of the Web is brought to you by Page One Power, our title sponsor of our show. Page One Power is an SEO agency specializing in sustainable link building and strategic content creation to create content and links that are tailored for your goals, all with a project manager who will be with you every step of the way through your campaign. So visit edgeofthewebradio.com/pageonepower today to sign up for a free 30-minute consultation. A fantastic company, and we certainly do appreciate their sponsorship on the show. Just want to let you know a little bit of housekeeping notes. Uh, who's going to be coming up on the show? Tim Schmoyer is going to be on the show, uh, in early August, as well as Dawn Anderson. We're also going to be having Olga Zarzesta and Marie Haynes coming up soon. Uh, be sure to check out the recent shows we've had. Bill Hartzler, uh, Norm Vogel, as well as Patrick Stocks. We actually unpacked a recent study that he and Ahrefs did about the missing data in Google Search Console. You got to check that one out. If you're interested in being part of the show, just drop us a line over at info@edgelofthewebradio.com. That's info@edgelofthewebradio.com. Set your reminders to, uh, on YouTube to make sure that you get notified when we post our videos as well. Make sure you check out all the weekly news, uh, from our news podcast that we drop each and every Tuesday. We cover all the recent marketing news of the week as well as Google updates. Um, A continued co-host on the show is Mordy Oberstein. You know he's always going to say something weird, so you might as well join on that show. With all that said, let's turn around and meet this week's industry expert guest. All right, let me tell you about Barry. He's an SEO consultant at Polemic Digital. Barry's an award-winning SEO consultant specializing in technical and editorial SEO for news publishers around the globe. He's been building and ranking websites since 1998 and has worked with a wide range of clients and micro-businesses to the world's largest media brands. He's an independent SEO consultant. He actually delivers specialized services to international media brands such as Fox, Future PLC, Investing.com, News UK, and many more. He's actually been an active SEO practitioner for 24 years, and he's earned a fair share of awards and accolades. The Polymic blog was nominated for the best blog in 2013 in UK Search Awards. He's also been a Digital Industries Person of the Year in 2014, Danny Awards 2016, UK Search Awards 2018, won the best SEO campaign at the annual Danny Award. So some fantastic awards there. Barry's also a regular speaker at top digital conferences such as PubCon, SMX, Brighton SEO and Friends of Search. We had Barry on the show at the beginning of the year with one of our Scrum episodes covering Google AMP. He and Jonah Alderson went to town on— it was civil, but still discussing the fight about Google AMP and SEO. So Barry, we certainly hope you had fun on the show last time. It was one of our better performing shows, honestly. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you very much for having me again, Aaron. Yeah, that Episode with Jono was really good fun when we got to spar a little bit about accelerated mobile pages. And, um, you know what, I think—

He says that with bile, doesn't he?

I can't not say it with disgust in my voice. It just comes naturally.

It does not roll off of Barry Adams' tongue that well. Uh, we certainly did appreciate the time you guys spent with us, and I wanted to circle back around, uh, and get you back on the show individually because there's certainly A wealth of information that you have in the news publishing SEO field. And it's high time we actually had a focus on that on the show. But before anything else, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about your history in your own words?

Ooh, where do I start? Yeah, I was building my own websites back in the late '90s, was it, when I was in uni, as most people who were IT savvy at the time were doing. And I realized that none of those websites were getting any traffic, naturally. it and they will come is not true on the internet, as we very quickly learned. So yeah, I started looking at ways to get visibility, to get traffic. And, you know, this is 1998 we're talking about, and Google was barely a thought in Sergey Brin's and Larry Page's heads. So we started looking at things like getting listed on the Yahoo directory. I don't know if you're old enough to remember that.

Oh, of course.

Yeah. And getting ranked on AltaVista by stuffing keywords in meta keyword Attributes and the white text on the white background and crap like that. That was really good fun. I didn't even know it was called SEO. I just you know did whatever I thought was necessary to to get more traffic to to my websites. Yeah. And in about 2004, I think I really became more professional about it when I got a job as an international webmaster, which is still the coolest job title I've ever had.

Absolutely.

And SEO was part of my remit there, and I really caught the bug then. And the company I worked for at the time was very kind enough to send me to search engine. Strategies conference in New York in 2007. And when I went there, I thought I knew a lot about SEO, and I thought I might be able to pick up a few things here and there. And after 3 days of that conference, I walked out of that hotel realizing I knew nothing about SEO. But I caught the bug. I really caught the bug. And that's when I decided, right, this is my thing. This is what I want to do. And then in 2010, I started working for a local newspaper here in Northern Ireland called the Belfast Telegraph. And that's when I realized that SEO for news publishers was quite a different beast than classic regular SEO for e-commerce websites and brochure websites. It's quite a different dynamic that news websites had then and still have with Google, both in the placements that they get in Google search results and the kind of optimization you need to do to rank well in Google's news ecosystem. So when I started my own consulting business back in 2014, I wasn't initially focused purely on news publishers, but I did have the experience. And I got a few publishing projects that way, and they turned out to be very successful projects. Not entirely up to me because I was fortunate enough to work with very talented, very passionate in-house teams at those, those publishers. And off the back of those successful projects, I sort of got a bit of a reputation as a guy who sort of knows what he's doing when it comes to news SEO. And, and I thought in 2017, 2018 to really embrace that. And decide to really start focusing on publishing as a niche. And that turned out to be a very good move because, as it happened, news publishers are very much underserviced when it comes to SEO specialties. There's a lot of specialist agencies out there for specific types of businesses, but news publishing— not a lot of agencies and consultants out there who have that expertise and who know how it's different from regular SEO. So yeah, off the back of that, I've just had one major client after the other sign up. And I'm a really, really fortunate position that I don't actually have to go looking for work. Work comes looking for me, which is a privilege I don't take for granted. So it's something I am keenly aware of that I need to treat in the right way. And yeah, it's done wonders for my career and I'm really genuinely excited with every new project that comes on board. I learn something new from every publisher that I work with, with every client that I work with. And it's, yeah, it's a lot Oh, that's fantastic.

And it does go to show if you actually focus on a particular industry, you can certainly arrive at that specialist moniker. And there's so many industries that need help and they go underserved. And there's a lot of SEOs that do local SEO work and more generalized type of things. But whenever you're talking about news, there's a level of volatility that's in that marketplace that no other industry has, right?

Oh yeah, it's, it's hard to even begin to describe that. When a news publisher publishes an article, that article in most cases as a news story has about 48 hours to get traffic from Google.

Wow.

That's it. Unless they have also an evergreen strategy, which more publishers do, but it's a minority of their content that will be focused on evergreen rankings, on longer rankings than 2 days. But a news article generally speaking, has maximum of 2 days to get traffic from Google.

That's amazing.

Which means they get one shot, just one shot at getting that traffic from Google. And if they go in afterwards and try to fix things, no, it doesn't work. Whereas with, you know, regular SEO, you go back to a piece of content, you tweak it, you improve it. You don't have that luxury with publishing. You have to get it right the moment you click publish, or that article is just not going to do as well as you want it to.

And, and I mean, the essence of what we're talking about here is that a news item is going to to be clamored on by so many different domains right then and there. So the publishing window is very tight. And you can also miss the mark, obviously, if your timing's not right. But at the same time, everybody's clamoring for that viable position at the same time. And then you have the battle of domain authority, so to speak, trustworthiness of different domains. And then it's a constant scrapyard fight. of domains going back and forth, and then they're literally trusting the algorithm and trusting where it weighs in. So there's a continued role that Google plays as the referee of what's citable, what's referenceable, what's trustworthy. Ultimately, those domains that have been notable and trustworthy have solid placement over time, but we've seen it time and time again, whenever a news article comes out, whoever gets it first actually gets that traction, but you also have to keep on building up your value of domain authority, or, I mean, that's the only way to actually have sustainability in that marketplace, right?

Yeah, I phrase it as topical expertise because I don't want people to get confused with the Moz link metric that is domain authority. Because, you know, you get a lot of confusing information out there. I phrase it as topical expertise. This is one of the interesting areas that is unique to news publishers where they have to balance the urgency of that initial ranking with also the long-term tactics that they need to implement to, to build that topical expertise over longer periods of time.

Mm-hmm.

Google wants to rank reputable news sources. They don't want to rank websites they can't trust. So you have to build up trust in Google's perspective. And there's a lot of things that go into that, and a lot of them overlap with what we now in the industry know as EATC signals. And it's about being a reputable publisher with high-quality journalistic output on a specific set of topics. That Google will then recognize as being your expertise as a publisher. If you're a general news publisher, you have the luxury of publishing a lot of content on a lot of different topics and having general expertise. But even there, we tend to see that Google likes to put big national news publishers in specific boxes, right? New York Times is politics, for example. New York Post is celebrity and entertainment. And there's not a lot of ranking outside of those topical boxes, even though they have the content for it. They tend to be put into specific topical areas, as in we trust you on that, not on that.

Right.

So if they publish articles that fit with their topical expertise, they will get visibility in the top stories boxes on Google search results. And if they publish content that Google does not see them as experts on, they just don't get that same level of visibility and their articles might not rank in top stories and in Google News.

That's amazing. That's judge and jury right there. And that's a topic that I want to actually get to after we go through a couple key insights that you've had with your experience. So for everyone who's listening, I want to make sure that you listen to the second episode as we really unpack SEO authority and trustworthiness of domains, because that deserves its own campfire right there. I caught up with you on Twitter here about a month ago whenever you actually rolled out some insights that you had in a thread. Talking about the fact that you've done over 50 SEO audits on news publishing websites, and you wanted to be able to share some of the common factors that you've seen through all of these websites. And you're dealing with millions of pages of websites, not for the faint of heart, so to speak. But you've learned from that, and you were sharing that, and you have been sharing that for a very long time, be able to give insights For companies to be able to learn from, SEOs to learn from, but be able to actually improve the environment of news publishing. That's what you've been doing as your career, but you're also trying to make sure that even if you're not working with a particular company, you're trying to improve just how news organizations are optimizing their content regularly. So that's laudable. But I wanted to jump in on some of the points that you covered, and if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to go through. each point and let you kind of unpack it for us. Is that okay?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let's go for it.

Fantastic, fantastic. So, uh, you referenced a couple things. Each point is worthy of discussion here. So first and foremost, the fact of the matter here is that we're dealing with information around quality raters guidelines, and there are certain challenges in the news industry. I mean, Google itself, um, is referencing this content as your money or your life type of content.

In the news space, yeah, it depends on what kind of news it's supposed in terms of the specific focus Google has when they write about that. We're talking about medical news. We're talking about topics about finance as well. Google is very, very careful about what websites to rank and which ones it doesn't rank, and it likes to to see certain trust signals built in on websites. In the context of news, one specific area is actually transparency, and Google has written separate blog posts about this. What they see as the transparency that is necessary for news publishers, which is different than what regular websites need to go through. And in the Humana Your Life sphere, this is also very relevant that Google wants to know who the people are behind the content. There you go. So not just the website itself, but also the people behind the website.

Very good.

Who are your authors? Who are your expert reviewers when it comes to scientific and medical information? Who are the owners of the website? How are they funded? What is the website's business model? Can we trust the output of this website as well. And there's certain hoops you have to jump through as a publisher to make that fairly clear and fairly transparent. The basic things to having like an actual office address in the country that you're targeting, right, to a bit more advanced methods of maybe having an editorial policy statement on your website, being signed up to certain journalistic organizations that have hallmarks of quality associated with them, as well as the basic stuff in EAT that we tend to know and love now, like having author bios, author profiles that link to social media, as well as having expert reviewers on content that would require that, like medical information or medical news stories, again, with actual biographies of the people who have performed that review. So it depends on exactly what kind of content you want to put out there. But there is a certain baseline of transparency that you need to put forward as a publisher for your content to be seen as trusted and worthwhile for Google to rank in those scenarios.

So that's invaluable. That also sounds like an incredible heavy lift whenever you're— whenever a news organization realizes that they needed to do that. So pivoting around to some more simpler tasks, maybe not as simple as I'm making out to be, but let's carve through some of the things that you've seen regularly before the trustworthiness investment really has to take hold. We're proud to have Page One Power as the new sponsor this Edge of the Web interview series segment. We're eager to share what they do for our listeners. Page One Power is an SEO agency specializing in sustainable link building and strategic content. With 11 years of experience, they build over 15,000 links each year for their clients. They focus on custom link building, white label link building, technical SEO audits, as well as content marketing. Make sure you visit edgeofthewebradio.com Go to pageonepower.com/pageonepower today to sign up for a free 30-minute consultation. Thanks for joining us, Page One Power. So your first reference out there was regarding news article structured data, and it's usually implemented the right way. However, images are defined in structured data, both an article and featured image are usually the wrong size and the wrong aspect ratios. Why is that so important?

It's very important because every time Google shows news in its ecosystem, either as a top stories box on regular search results, in the news tab on Google search results, or in the Google News vertical, and also in Google Discover feed, it always has a visual element. There is always a thumbnail image that goes along with that.

Right.

And that means you have to, A, provide an image for Google to use, but B, that image needs to meet certain minimum standards of especially size requirements.

Mm-hmm.

For general Google News, so that is Google News, the news.google.com vertical, as well as top stories and the news tab, we all call that Google News. The minimum requirement is a width of 696 pixels, and then the height can be quite variable, ideally in an aspect ratio that's fairly standard, like a 4:3 or a 16:9 or a 1:1, so that Google can just use that thumbnail image in different contexts. That allows Google to then show that thumbnail image correctly when that news article is shown in those news ecosystems. For the Discover feed, the width requirement is a lot higher. It needs to be 1200 pixels wide minimum, and ideally a 16:9 aspect ratio, because on the Discover feed, Google likes to show a banner heading image for an article as it's being shown there.

Hmm.

And most news publishers that I work with don't have any such minimum requirements attached to the news article structured data that they implement. They just leave it up to whatever they get supplied to as the stock image for a specific article, or whatever the photo desk, the image desk tends to supply them. And it'll validate fine in Google's Wix Results Test. It'll validate fine in the Schema Markup Validator. Google does not throw a warning or error out there.

Sure.

Which makes most publishers believe, oh, it's fine, we can just use that. But the fact is, if those images do not meet those minimum size requirements, the article is less likely to be picked up by Google and less likely to be shown in those news rankings.

Yeah, a huge win if you can get that adopted as a discipline inside an organization. But what you actually just pointed out was that there's a lot of decision-making from the publishers or the news desk that aren't being informed of these particular requirements. So just having a— I think having these news organizations just having these type of checklist policies, it has to be adopted from the top down. Because the producers of the news, the editors themselves aren't wired that way. They're moving news information. And at what point in time can you influence the corporate structure to be able to have that type of adopted principle along with a number of other things that we're talking about today? It just dawned on me that you got to be able to find the chink in the armor to be able to influence and get that discipline moving.

Absolutely. I think with things like this is the more you can automate it, the better, because it takes the decision-making out of the hands of people and you're not relying on humans to make the right decisions at that time. So when it comes to images, for example, if this is a CMS thing, this is something that should be built into the CMS as a minimum requirement. When a journalist uploads an image that goes with an article, it checks the image whether or not it meets the requirements. And if it doesn't, it says, give me a better image. And that is just a very straightforward way of making sure these things just don't occur, that you always have those requirements met. The same with things like headline length. There is a hard limit of 110 characters on the headline attribute of a news article structured data snippet, which again is not particularly well documented. So most publishers don't know about the 110-character limit. And it's something that you actually build into the CMS, that the headline attribute that is generated by the content management system never exceeds 110 characters. And journalists, again, if they put in a longer headline than that, It's quite a stretch because, you know, 110 characters is quite a long headline actually. But they should be triggered then by the CMS to say, oh no, this is too long, give us something shorter.

Very good, very good.

The more you can automate it, the better really.

Absolutely. You got to make it, I hate to say it, idiot-proof. You got to make it so it's actually governing that level of quality that you're looking for. However, this next point is actually much more intuitive for the editor. And whenever you're talking about Links, cross-links, interlinks between pages and site content. This is a world of semantic relevancy that if you have an editor that has no knowledge of the different articles that are referenceable by what they're creating, they're a stranger in a strange land. You have to have a map of knowledge of the different content pieces that are out there because you can make a huge argument of solvency of subject matter and subpoints As you publish an article, if you do it right, if you have a map of references, certainly tags, as you mentioned, tags are used to some degree, but that's the chrome of an actual environment. It's not the inner workings. It's not the inline content that is the most valuable jewels of the realm there. So how do you discipline a news organization to know the content that they're referencing?

Yeah, this is probably one of the biggest challenges that I have with publishers, and it actually all stems back— if I can go on a little bit of a tangent— to the popularity of WordPress as a platform, because WordPress as a blogging platform had tags built in, and that got abused by a lot of websites that used WordPress to the extent that too many websites had too many tags. And it created a bit of a backlash in both the web development and the SEO industries where tags are now seen as a bad thing. And I see a lot of publishers stop using tags or roll back their use of tags. I'm like, actually, no, you don't want to do that. You know, the theory is, oh, these tag pages don't have a lot of added value. They create a lot of crawl waste. We want to preserve Google's crawl budget. So let's just get rid of tag pages. And that's the wrong thing because in the context of news publishing and semantic SEO, tags have a very important role to play because again, if you publish articles on specific topics regularly, you can create tag pages for those topics. And Google will see them and see the volume of articles that you publish related to those tags and will then determine whether or not you're an expert on those topics. If, for example, your local news publisher and your local sports team is doing well or not so well, whatever happens, but you write a lot of articles about it, that means Google sees you as a local publisher as an expert on that particular sports team. So when something interesting happens and you write an article about that, you actually get a shot of outranking nationwide publishers on news for that specific sports team because you are seen as the local expert on that specific sports team, provided you have the proper topical structure on your website in place that tells Google, oh, these are all your articles related to that sports team, and you have a special tag for their coach, you have special tags for their star players, etc., etc.

No, no.

The creation of tags is something though that tends to go wrong with publishers, and that's why this is such a hard process to manage, because we do want to encourage publishers to use tags, but they shouldn't just go wild and free-for-all. There should be a process in place. You know, you want to make sure that not everybody has the ability to create tags. Not every journalist should just be able to create a new tag. You want to make sure your tags don't overlap, where you have several different ways of saying the same thing, and each of them has a separate tag. That's an absolute nightmare. You just want one tag for one topic. And you don't want to create too many different tags either, because then you dilute whatever topical expertise your website has. So you want a fairly narrow list of tags. And for some publishers, that's 100 tags. For other publishes, it's 10,000 tags. Wow. It really depends on the volume of content that you publish and how broad a scope your website in general has. So I'm actually a fan of taking it out of the CMS to a certain extent. Yeah. And having like a separate Google Sheet or what, a shareable spreadsheet where you just keep a track of all your tags plus the URLs. Mm-hmm. And the rough idea of how many articles you publish on them. And you can again automate this to a certain extent and then use that as a regular touching stone, maybe once a quarter. You review those tags and see, do we have to add new tags? Because news evolves, stories evolve, new topics emerge. And do we have to maybe consider deleting some older tags that we've stopped using or merging them with other tags? And that's, that's the hard part because that's a more or less manual process. That is extra work you're putting on an editorial desk which is already swamped and probably has too much to do and not enough time. But it is a valuable process to implement because it does contribute to, like we mentioned before, the topical expertise of a publisher in Google's eyes, and will drive better rankings in Google's news ecosystem over longer periods of time.

You know, there's a great tool that I've been experimenting with that actually also associates structured data in the tag space. That's Wordlift. And I've been really enamored with what it can actually do as it actually is applying that entity structure at the tag level and distributing it across every tagged page. And it actually creates kind of a global association of entity information. Not asking you to advocate at all on the behalf of that tool, but are you seeing this type of new level of data automation starting to come in from a news publication environment? We're proud to have Site Strategics as a sponsor of Edge of the Web We're pioneers in the agile digital marketing methodology. Core specialties that we provide are technical SEO, including Core Web Vitals optimization, search engine marketing, social media marketing and management, focus on conversion rate optimization, truly focused on results-based marketing that works. We've also developed a unique omnichannel media marketing and content curation process that's guided by our weekly R&D from our edge of the web interviews. We incorporate the best techniques for our content broadcast strategy and execution. If you're interested in what we can do for you, just give us a call at 877-SEO-FOR-WEB or 877-736-4932.

Yes, absolutely. There are a few publishing CMSs. One that comes to mind is the Glide platform, who are building this into their CMS from scratch. And there's a specific platform for news publishers who have this, this semantic an analysis mechanism built in where they analyze your article text and then say suggest tags for you to implement. I like the fact that there's still this level of manual control over this because I think the machines are getting very, very good. They're not quite perfect yet.

Sure.

So that does need to be a bit of human oversight. But again, the more you can automate this, the better. And other publishers have built their own in-house systems that do the same thing, that analyze the content for certain keywords, certain phrases, certain topics, and then suggest tags to be added to that. And The more you can automate it, and the easier you can make it for individual journalists to just tick a few boxes and click publish, the more likely it is that it's going to be implemented correctly. And you have a level of consistency in articles as they get published with the right tags. And it's all about that consistency. You know, it's about doing the right things again and again and again over longer periods of time that really drives your improvements in SEO.

Yeah, absolutely. We could have an entire show just about linking itself, obviously. Internal relevancy is still— there's still such a discipline and sort of art form to make sure you reference the links inside your content as opposed to just tags. But tags are certainly making a reclamation of value in the CMS. Let me move on real quick and talking about pagination of articles, lists on a category page, handling more and more load more buttons or the infinite scroll like you referenced, that can actually make a page of an indexed content uncrawlable by Google. So that sounds terrible. It is terrible. Why has infinite scroll— why does it even exist whenever we have this challenge of Google digesting the content after it drops off of 10 articles?

Yeah, it's something that was implemented on many websites because it makes for better user experience, or so the theory goes. where, you know, you automatically scroll, you get more articles. I hate that. I like clicking on buttons. And even then, with some implementations of load more buttons, it's not exactly done right because there's no crawlable URL for a page 2 or page 3 there because it's all driven by JavaScript. Um, again, a lot of websites do this because they think it preserves crawl budget. You know, they don't like having 100 pages of content in a specific site section or on a tag page.

Right.

And I sort of see where they're coming from, and it is something that you have to carefully managed. But at the same time, you want Google to see more than just one page of content. And that's the problem with these implementations of like infinite scroll or JavaScript-driven load more buttons. Because Google, when it indexes your section page or any page on your website, Google doesn't scroll, Google doesn't click. So anything that requires a user action to be actually loaded into the web page, loaded into the DOM, is invisible as far as Google is concerned. So in, in those scenarios, Google only sees the first page of content on a specific topic. And that means Google has a very limited view at any given time of the amount of content that you publish on a specific topic. So I'm a fan of implementing pagination that is actually crawlable for Googlebot up to a certain limit. There's some websites that do this really elegantly. One of my favorites is a popular website called TechRadar. They have like 10 pages of normal crawlable pagination. And then on page 11, it gets changed to a date-focused archive page, which still allows Googlebot to crawl, but it's a bit more effort. But at least that's 10 pages of siloed content on a specific topic, be that a section page or a tag page. And that's, that's, I find that a really elegant solution. And it sort of, you know, finds that right balance between allowing Google to crawl multiple pages of articles on a specific topic. So Google has that overview of your topical expertise. But also not wasting too much of Google's crawl effort on really deep older content that you don't necessarily want Google to crawl very often. Yeah. Right. So that is that particular challenge that you have with pagination that, you know, you want to find that sweet spot between, you know, letting Google crawl more, but not letting it crawl too much.

And these are like watershed moments of reveal that we're talking about here. If you're hiding your content and you're thinking you're making the user's experience better by by tucking it away. My gosh, what damage they're doing to the value of their content. And no, it's already a tough battle for that 48 hours. And if you're actually making your content disappear just because of a user function, you're actually taking— you're kneecapping yourself with a level of visibility. Quickly, we already talked about entities as it applies to authors and roles in the site. And we're certainly going to get into that a little bit later. Uh, as we talk about more authority, but crawl issues themselves, we're talking about, and we're talking about CLS, we're talking about page experience, but being on a slow server, right? Uh, can kill the visibility of site content. Briefly, you want to talk about, uh, why that's so important?

Yeah, this is about the server response time, which we now have access to in the crawl stats report in Google Search Console. Yep. Uh, which I'm really grateful for. It's a fantastic report. When it comes to news, you want Google to be able to crawl content and index content as fast as you publish it, because you know that being that initial publisher on on a news story is is very very important. You want your articles to be indexed pretty much the moment you publish them. I have seen many many cases where websites improve their time to first byte, the server response time, and Google will just crawl more pages on that website. It increases crawl effort, and the reverse is also true when pages slow down. Right? The server response time increases, they get slower. Google crawls fewer pages. They just spend less time crawling that page because it takes them more effort. Google has actually gone on record at some stage in the past, and they, they have since, I think, deleted those original documents, but they said they wanted a 200-millisecond or faster response time, which is actually crazy fast. Yes, it is. Unlikely for most websites to get there. For me personally, when I audit a website, I put the line at 500 milliseconds, which is half a second, which is already quite slow, if I'm honest. But if it's slower than half a second, you probably want to improve your server response time. You want to improve your hosting, improve your server environment, improve your caching infrastructure, whatever you have in place to serve your pages faster to Googlebot when it crawls your website. And this is something that sometimes gets flagged in classic SEO as well, because it might be an issue with, you know, Core Web Vitals. The Largest Contentful Paint is slow because the server response time is slow. But in the context of news, it probably has a bit of a higher priority because you really want Google to be able to crawl your website as fast as it possibly can. And keep in mind that when it comes to discovering new articles, right, Google relies very heavily on crawling homepages and section pages. You know, we have XML sitemaps and also a specific Google News XML sitemap, right? But those are supplementary signals. Google's main discovery mechanism is still crawling your homepage and crawling your section pages. And on some of my publishing client websites, Google crawls them every few seconds. Literally, it will crawl the homepage of a major publisher website every 5 seconds to find new content.

That's Amazing.

So you want that page to be served to Google as fast as possible so Google can immediately see whether or not there's a new article, and Google can then go and crawl that article and immediately index it.

Right.

So that's why that server response time that you see in, in, in the crawl stats report needs to be as fast as you can make it. It goes into overall quality signals as well. I don't think server response time individually is a quality signal, but it does go into Core Web Vitals. And, you know, that's, that's a user experience signal. So it's not, not something you want to take for granted. And it's not just a one-off effort either, especially with news publishers who often reliant on whatever is being served by a specific ad exchange to hopefully play nice and don't ruin— not ruin the user experience too much. So they have to be quite on top of those elements as well. So anything they can control themselves, like server response time and page layout issues, they really need to focus on because they might lose some of that When it comes to serving advertising on their pages, which they don't have as much control over.

Yeah, yeah, we're going to be talking about that. Let's wrap up these points real quick because we're going to cover the remaining SEO points that news publishers need to be aware of in our second segment, as well as getting into quality of content and truth. You know, where's that land on the search spectrum? Check out the second episode linked in the show notes and available from the podcast player you're in right now. Any final thoughts on this segment, Barry?

No, I think this is really, really good fun. Something we can keep talking about for another hour or two easily, because it's a never-ending fount of information. So yeah, I'm looking forward to the second bit.

All right. So make sure you listen to the second part of the Barry Adams interview by visiting edgeofthewebradio.com. Follow Barry Adams @badsams and follow us on Twitter @edgewebradio. Thanks to our sponsors, Page One Power and Site Strategics. Make sure that you check out all the must-see videos over at edgeofthewebradio.com. That's edgeofthewebradio.com. If you can't wait for the second episode, jump over to the YouTube channel because we have the entire interview there. From all of us over at Edge, stay safe, stay well, and do not be a piece of cyber driftwood. We'll talk to you next week.

Bye-bye.