Barry Adams Reveals Secrets of SEO for News Sites (Top Secret)

Hi everyone. Welcome to SEO Podcast by SEO Sly. I'm Olga Zarr, your host, and today my guest is Barry Adams. This is a very special guest. Barry, how are you doing?

I'm very, very good. Thank you very much for having me, Olga.

Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. I've been like following you forever and it's so cool to finally have you here and to be able to pick your brains a bit. Okay. So for people who don't know you, but I'm not, I don't know if there are such people, can you like in 2 sentences tell them who you are, what you are up to in SEO?

Oh, I don't think there's plenty of people out there who do, haven't heard of me yet. Um, I suppose I'm one of the old dinosaurs of, of SEO. I've been around the industry for a very long time and since about the last 5 years or so, I, I specialize in working with news publishers. So my specialty is SEO for news websites.

Uh-huh. Yeah. And that, that's something I will also want to ask you a lot about. So Barry, let's go back in time to the very beginnings of your SEO journey. So when did you start and how it all started? If you can walk me through like the beginnings up until now.

Oh, it's a long story cuz like I said, I'm one of the old dinosaurs, I, I suppose. I first started doing SEO before we even realized what it was called. It was back in 1998, late 1998. I was still in uni and I built my own website and realized nobody was visiting it. So I thought, right, I need to maybe do something with this website to make it findable. And back then that was about getting listed in the Yahoo directory and DMOZ and things like that. And then, you know, you stuffed the meta tag, the keywords meta tag full of keywords and stuff. So that's basically what my first foray into SEO was, purely for hobby, hobby websites, hobby projects. But I started working more in the web industry after that. I started out as a pure IT geek doing network and server administration. And in the mid-2000s, I got put in charge of corporate internet and intranet infrastructure, so managing the web servers. And because I knew a bit of HTML, at some stage they also asked me to manage what was on the servers, the intranets and internet web pages and Pure HTML and CSS back in, back in those days. So that's how I got started managing websites, basically. And then in 2005, I started working for a company as their international webmaster, which is still the coolest job title I've ever had, by the way. And I was basically put in charge of all traffic generation for that website— email, pay-per-click, and SEO. Social wasn't really there yet, so that wasn't really a channel back in those days. So I learned a little bit about SEO as part of my remit in that job. And in 2007, that company sent me to the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. And prior to going to that conference, I thought I'd sort of nailed SEO and I knew what I was doing. I was pretty confident, probably arrogant. And that was a 3-day conference in New York and people like Matt Cutts were speaking there and Kim Krause-Berg and Barry Schwartz. And I walked out of that conference center 3 days later realizing I knew nothing. I was, I was a total newbie. I was, I was below ground floor in terms of SEO capabilities, but I caught the bug. I thought, this is it. This is what I want to do. I want to become an expert in SEO if I can. Um, so that's when I really started to narrow down in my specialty. And I've been lucky enough over the years to find jobs that aligned with that goal that I had. Uh, I moved from the Netherlands where I'm originally from to Northern Ireland in 2009. One of my first jobs here was in-house SEO at the Belfast Telegraph, the local newspaper.

Mm-hmm.

And it was more or less a case of the one-eyed king in the land of the blind, because I don't think I was— I should have gotten that job because I don't think my SEO capabilities were good enough at that stage, looking back. But They had very few options to pick from because SEO in Northern Ireland was at a very early level. There were not a lot of people who had any sort of experience in SEO. So yeah, I got thrown into that particular landscape, which was my introduction to SEO for news websites. Now that specialty sort of lay dormant for a while because after working with the Belfast Telegraph, I went to work for a local agency. Again, I focused very heavily on SEO, but I was put in charge of the whole department there. So I also managed like content marketing, digital, social media, pay-per-click. email marketing, that sort of thing, as well as building and designing websites for clients. I did that for 4 years. And then in 2014, I decided to go freelance because while I felt we had a pretty strong agency team and we were doing quite well, I wasn't happy in that job at all because I was more of a manager rather than a doer. And I don't think managing people has ever been my strong suit. So I went freelance and in the first few years of going freelance, I sort of just took on any project that came my way, be it e-commerce or brochure website or whatever it was. But in 2016, I was approached by people from The Sun newspaper in London, a really big tabloid news website in the UK. They were rebuilding their website. It had a paywall for a very long time and they dropped the paywall and decided to replatform their entire website. And for some reason they found me and that's because the project manager who was put in charge of that project, she was originally from Northern Ireland and realized that the Belfast Telegraph was probably punching above its weight in Google News and Google search results, uh, and got a lot more visibility than it deserved to get by virtue of being a very small local news publisher. And I think that was because when I was working there, uh, me and the online editor, Jerome Crawley, we just loved to experiment and try things out and play around with titles, headlines, URLs, just to see what would work. how Google would pick it up specifically in their news ecosystem. And we found quite a lot of, I would say, flaws and weaknesses in Google's news-specific ranking systems. And I was still consulting on a freelance basis for the Belfast Telegraph and their related properties. So my name apparently came up and she started making phone calls to inquire about who was responsible for the SEO. So I got that project basically thrown into my lap. And that was a very interesting project, a very successful project as well. Even though I don't think I can take a lot of credit for that. I just happened to work with a very good team of very motivated, very intelligent people. And the relaunch was very successful. They blew all the traffic goals away. And that just opened a lot of doors for me to start working with other news publishers. And that's when I sort of started to get the idea that maybe working with news websites was quite an interesting niche to be in because I also realized there were not many freelancers or consultants or even agencies out there who had any sort of experience working with news in the context of SEO. Uh, and, and SEO and news is quite a bit different than, than what I call classic SEO, which we'll talk about later, I imagine.

Yeah.

Um, so, you know, more publishers came along, but I also had other clients that were non-news clients. And I think in about 2019, I sort of made the decision to try and specialize purely in news publishers to see if I could make that work. And I think there was also a bit of lucky timing there because this was just before the pandemic. Then the pandemic hit, everybody spent a lot more time at home, everybody spent a lot more time online, and news publishers thought, did we need to take this SEO malarkey quite seriously because it's getting a lot more competitive? And because I just started my newsletter, seoforgooglenews.com, I started to build a bit of a reputation as the Google News SEO guy. Uh, and then my, my virtual phone didn't really stop ringing. I, I was very, very busy and have been very, very busy ever since working pretty much exclusively with news publishers on doing SEO for them and, and helping them with all kinds of different, uh, search engine challenges that they have. So yeah, again, I've been very fortunate over the many years to be in the right place at the right time and talk to the right people and, uh, Yeah, as a result, I'm now pretty established as the news SEO guy, which is a luxury we don't take for granted either. You know, you're only as good as your last project. So I always try to make sure that every client gets good value from working with me and that it's, you know, a worthwhile project for everyone involved.

That's a good quote. Be as good— you are as good as your last project. I'll have to like put it somewhere in the visible place. So now you are Are you basically a freelancer as well, or do you have like a team of people working with you?

No, it's just me, uh, me and my wife. She handles the operational side of the business.

Uh-huh.

Because again, that's stuff I don't like doing and I'm not good at, but she comes from a commercial background. She's very good at that. And I do the SEO work. So we are basically a 2-person operation, and that's by design. Uh, I realize that that's what I like to do. That's how I like to work. And I also find that it helps getting clients on board because when they hire me, they hire me. No outsourcers, no juniors. They get my expertise, my insight. And I find that that makes the client quite confident about working with me, that they're going to get a certain level of service. It also means that there's often a bit of a waiting list when clients come on board because I do work on a first-come, first-served basis. But most of my clients seem to be okay with that. You know, they're okay with a few months of a waiting period before I can start Things like a site audit or, or some other project working with them. Yeah. So yeah, just a small operation and that's exactly how we like it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's totally the same with me. It's just me and my husband who is also an SEO and like the same setup and I don't want to scale in any way. So I totally understand.

It's fun.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Okay. So, um, Maybe now I will ask you a few questions about SEO for news because, because yeah, it differs a lot. So the first one, how does it differ exactly from like regular SEO?

I think the biggest difference is that with, with SEO for news articles specifically, you get one chance. Um, when you publish an article on a news website, It will start appearing in Google's news-specific ecosystem, like top stories boxes and Google News and Google Discover, pretty much straight away. And it has a shelf life there of about 36 to 48 hours. It's quite rare to see articles older than 2 days show up in those news-specific ranking elements. And more importantly, when Google first sees and crawls and indexes an article on the news website, it is not going to revisit that article and recrawl it until several days later, at which stage it's already dropped out of Google's news-specific ranking elements because it's older than 2 days, which means the moment you click publish, you have to have your on-page SEO and all the other elements perfect. You cannot then go back and make changes later and expect Google to pick that up because that's it. Your chance is gone.

Oh.

Google will crawl and index that article within a few minutes of you publishing it generally. And if you make changes after that, Google is not going to see the changes until several days later, at which point it's not a news article anymore. It'll drop out of the news index really. So you get one chance, you get one shot at it. And that's very different from classic SEO because you can publish an article, publish a new piece of content or page, whatever, and then continually update it, improve it, and make constant changes to it. You don't have that luxury for news articles. You have one chance and you have to get it right because you're not going to get another chance. Which means we're much more process-oriented, much more focused on the workflow leading up to publication to make sure SEO gets done as part of that workflow. And it's not something that is added on afterwards because you have to embed that process correctly and make sure it is done, especially for publishers who publish dozens, if not hundreds of articles a day. You can't rely on like one single SEO person or even a small team of SEO people to be able to do that. tweak and improve all those articles before they go live. It's too much work and it slows down the publishing process too much. So you need to have really good habits installed in the workflow from journalists and editors so that that stuff gets done and gets done properly before that article is published.

Yeah, that's super interesting. I didn't know that. So for news websites, it looks like Google is constantly almost crawling them and looking for, for new articles?

Yes. Uh, calls them very, very often. Uh, some people are really staggered at how often Google calls, especially the homepages and section pages of, of news websites and also the news-specific XML sitemaps. Google calls those quite a lot too. For some of my clients, you know, when we look at server logs, we see Google pinging the homepage like once every 5 seconds. Oh, see if there's an update. Uh, I know these are big publishers, like 400, 500, 600 articles a day. So Google, you know, knows that these homepages change very, very often, and there is a good chance that something new to be found. And Google will just check every 5 to 10 seconds if there is an updated article on that homepage. And that's, you know, that's very exciting because it's very easy to get content indexed and ranked because you just feature it on the homepage and voilà, it's there. But also very risky because if you click publish too soon, you basically fucked up. And you know, you don't, you don't get a second chance.

Yeah.

Unless you create a new article. And that's one of the weaknesses we also find when, well, I don't know if it's a weakness, it's a feature, I think, of Google News. And I think Google in general, that Google uses an article's URL and only its URL as the unique identifier, not the headline, not the content, but the URL. And the moment you change the URL, even if it's just one character different, Google will see it as a new article. Which is very risky because it means you can lose rankings if you change your URL, but also it's an opportunity, which means you can basically force Google to interpret it as a new article if you want to make changes by just changing the URL of the article.

Okay. Okay. Any other significant differences you can talk about?

Um, yeah, I mean, the rest of it, a lot of it aligns a lot with what SEO is already doing in, in other contexts like e-commerce, which is building up long-term quality and authority signals. I think the main difference there is, is that news websites are not necessarily reliant on doing things like link building, um, because they are link magnets by virtue of being a news website, which means internal linking becomes much more important for news websites. Internal linking, including your top navigation, your in-article linking, the structure of your website is incredibly important to send the right signals of topic authority. to, uh, to, to Google. Uh, and for most news websites that are not like nationwide general news websites, uh, it's quite important to have a specialty as well, to be seen as a specialist in, in one or a small section of topics.

Mm-hmm.

Because Google doesn't necessarily like to rank general news websites for specialist news topics. They like ranking specialist news websites, especially if it's like local news or very niche topics.

Mm-hmm.

Google wants to show local niche websites in its search results, uh, for those sorts of, of topics and those sorts of news stories.

Okay. And regarding like the Google News algorithm and the evaluations it, it does, like what are the differences? What's the one values over another? I guess there are some differences. So is it probably more EEIT or, and what else?

Yeah, EEAT is very important, but I think when it comes to articles, as SEOs, we've always been told that the title tag is the most important on-page element.

Yeah.

And in news, Google really doesn't care what your title tag is. It cares about your headline, your visible headline, which can be different from your title tag and often is. And it's not even just a visible headline. It's actually the headline in your structured data, your news article or article structured data that's in the HTML source code. The headline attribute there That's what Google uses to show the article in top stories and in Google News. So that headline, which is usually the same as your visible headline, but can be different, that's the one you need to optimize for maximum relevancy. And you don't have a lot of space there either, but you have a bit more space than you would have with a classic headline. I mean, classic headline, we say 60 to 70 characters, but you can make them longer, but you get the dot, dot, dot cutoff. With news headlines in those top stories boxes, you tend to have a bit more visual space, like 70, 80, sometimes even 90. Characters before Google shows the dot dot dot. But what I like to show my clients is that when you actually look at the source code of a Google search results page and you look at those headlines, the entire headline without any abbreviation is in the source code. That dot dot dot cutoff is a purely visual element, which means you have actually quite a lot of space in that headline to work with. It used to be a hard cutoff of 110 characters. But that's not a cutoff anymore. I think the schema.org standard has evolved where that headline attribute can now be longer than 110 characters. But I generally tell my clients around 100, 110 is probably enough. If it's longer than that, you may be not really writing a headline and you're writing more of a paragraph. But, you know, it also means you don't really have to worry too much about the length of the headline in terms of optimizing for it. Um, I still tell my clients the first 5 to 8 words are where you want to put the important keywords in, the ones you want to rank for. But the total length of the headline, 100, 110, 120 characters, that's fine. So don't obsess too much over that as long as it's an accurate description of what you're writing about and it has the right search terms, the right keywords in it.

Okay. And regarding Google News and Google Discover, do those news articles often get into Google Discover as well? Like based on your observations from Yes and no.

This is a really interesting dynamic because Discover works slightly differently. Discover is very much an engagement and interests-based feed that is very personalized for users. There is no search involved in Discover, which means even the best crafted headlines don't necessarily work in Discover. Discover works off of quite different signals. I think the quality signals like EEAT signals and topic authority signals in Discover are the same as in News, but the individual ranking signals for articles in Discover are much more based on what that user does and does not do, what, what they click on, what they don't click on, as well as the searches that they actually perform that inform Google what their interests actually are. And I found that optimizing for Discover, especially optimizing headlines for Discover, is different than optimizing headlines for News.

Yeah.

Because for Discover, you want, I wouldn't necessarily say clickbait headlines, but a bit more attractive headlines, a bit more engaging, a bit more, oh, let's see what that is. Whereas those sorts of headlines really don't work in, in news and in top stories.

Mm-hmm.

Because those headlines need to be very straightforward, very explicit, and very clear to say, this is what the article is about. And that doesn't work in Discover because that's too blunt and doesn't have a high engagement associated with it. So there's a bit of a dynamic there where sometimes publishers have to choose whether to optimize an article for Discover or for news. Because it's not always possible to do both. But there's another mechanism there in that sometimes, not often, but sometimes I see Google Discover not use the structured data headline in Discover, but the Open Graph headline, like the Open Graph headline in your Open Graph tags that are intended for Facebook. That's what Facebook uses when you upload or you share a link on Facebook. Google Facebook will very quickly scan the article, extract the Open Graph tags, and use that to filter and to feed that little preview in Facebook. Discover sometimes also uses those Open Graph headlines, which means as a publisher, what you can do is your news article structured data headline, that's what you need to optimize for news and for top stories, but your Open Graph headline, which you tend to optimize for Facebook, you can also optimize for Discover. And that's more or less the same rules because headlines that work well on social media like Facebook also tend to work well for Discover, slightly more clickbaity, you know, not necessarily giving away the full story in the headline. So it's an interesting dynamic, but we can't necessarily rely on Google always using the Open Graph headline in Discover. It also often also uses the visible headline and/or the structured data headline.

Mm-hmm.

So it's a bit of a trial and error mechanism there. And optimizing for Discover is much more about creating good engagement with your content so that, you know, Google sees that as, as a positive signal that people keep returning to your website and spend a long time on your website. As well as signposting the topics that your articles are a part of, because, you know, uh, Google will show articles based on known user interests to that particular user. And if your, your article is very clearly targeting those same interests, there's a much higher chance of your articles being shown in those users' Discover feed.

Yeah, totally. Oh, let's say I'm starting a new website about news. How do I get into Google Discover? How, how do I compete with those Is there a chance for me to?

Yeah, that's a tough one. Um, it takes patience, uh, and perseverance. On average, when you start a completely new publishing website with no history and no background and you start it from scratch, the, you can get into Discover in about 6 months, 3 to 6 months. If you, you go on, that is engaging and fun, you can get Discover traffic quite quickly, especially if you also do classic SEO really well and you get traction on social media. social media. It's, it's, it's possible within 3 to 6 months to get good traffic from Discover and build a bit of an audience there. Google News and Top Stories, that takes at least 2 years.

Oh.

It's very rare to get a website faster than 2 years in Google's news-specific ecosystem. It's because Google uses an algorithmic inclusion process to determine whether or not the website is a news website, and that means a certain length of history. and quality of reporting over a long period of time before you reach that threshold where Google says, okay, I can trust you now as a publisher. You're not just a fly-by-night outfit. You're not just a propaganda outlet. You're a serious news publisher. And yeah, the fastest I've seen that happen is 2 years, 2.5 years, 3 years, sometimes even 4 years. And that is something that changed since the end of 2019, because before then we had a manual approval process for Google News.

Mm-hmm.

We could just fill in a form and tell Google, oh, I've got a news website. And then some engineer in California or maybe some outsourced engineer somewhere around the world would look at your website and say, yeah, okay, you're news, or say, no, you're not news, you need to fix a few things. So it was quite predictable and we sort of knew what they were looking for and it was quite easy to get into Google's news-specific ecosystem. But in December 2019, Google decided to throw that all away. And go for an algorithmic inclusion process that's not reliant on any sort of manual intervention. And since then, it's become very hard. And like I said, since then, it takes on average 2 years or more for a new website to get accepted as a news publisher and start showing up in Google News and top stories. Discover, like I said, is much easier. 3 to 6 months, sometimes a bit longer. But news, yeah, that's at least 2 years. So that's something you have to keep in mind when you launch a new website. Or when you change domains of an existing news website, because when you change the domain name, you lose your Google News inclusion. Mm-hmm. And you have to re-earn it. And that can take 2 years as well. So changing domains as a news publisher is very, very risky and you generally don't want to do that.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. And regarding AMP, because like before this Core Web Vitals update, I think you had to to have AMP versions to, to be eligible for top stories, then it changed. And how did it like impact the entire, the entire industry? Like, did you, did you see some interesting case? Like for example, the site got a ton of traffic or lose a ton of traffic because they, for example, gave up, uh, on AMP. Like, is there something to share?

There's a lot to share there. I mean, I've, I've, been on record as a very vocal opponent of AMP. I don't like AMP and I don't like what Google tried to do with AMP.

Me too.

But like you said, it was a requirement for appearing in top stories on mobile search results. So most publishers felt they didn't have a choice and had AMP versions of their articles. And that requirement was dropped. And what struck me the most is you can see exactly When that requirement was dropped. I think it was, uh, 2021. Yeah, 2021. Um, and literally from one day to the next, the percentage of non-AMP articles appearing in mobile top stories went from over 5 or 6% to 25%.

Oh.

Uh, so I found that really, really interesting, and it also made me really, really angry because those 20% of publishers that suddenly started appearing in Mobile Top Stories, they obviously ticked all the boxes already. They had quality of reporting, good quality content, high levels of authority, E-E-A-T, all those things, except they didn't have AMP. And that's the only reason they did not show up on Mobile Top Stories, because they didn't have AMP. And then when Google dropped the requirement, boom, suddenly they were all in Top Stories. And that pissed me off and still pisses me off because That is such a level of blackmail that Google did. No matter how good you are, if you don't have AMP, we're not going to show you. And it shows to me the enormous amount of power that Google had forcing us to adopt standards that are only for Google's benefit and not for anybody else's benefit. And it really made me angry that suddenly all these publishers started appearing that never had AMP or had deleted AMP after trying it out.

Right.

Because they should have been in those top stories all those years anyway, but they weren't because they didn't have AMP versions. And since then, what struck me the most is that many publishers have just killed off AMP one after the other, one after the other. And most of those don't see any negative impact from that. In fact, some of them actually report that they see an increase in traffic from mobile by killing off AMP.

Wow.

So, uh, as far as I'm concerned, if your Core Web Vitals as a publisher are decent to good, Just kill off AMP, delete AMP because it's costing people money. It's costing publishers money to maintain AMP pages and they don't need to do that. The effort is better spent on, on optimizing other aspects of the website. There is literally no reason now for a publisher to have AMP.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And regarding technical requirements, are there like specific technical requirements that a site needs to meet in order to be eligible for Google News, or is it like that just algorithms somehow determine, like with Google Discover where it's, it's said, but it's not like that clear.

Yeah, there are some things that Google positions as recommendations, not requirements, like article or news article structured data. It's, it's recommended but not required. A news-specific XML sitemap, also recommended but not required. I think the main requirement is that your website needs to be I very often get questions from websites, oh, we have a commercial website and we have a really good news section for that website. How do we get that news section into Google News? And the answer is always the same. You can't forget about it. It's not gonna happen.

Okay.

Your website needs to be a dedicated news publisher and should not have any other commercial goals aside news, uh, primarily. You can have some other like affiliate content and things like that, but the main purpose of the website should be to publish news. And if you do that, It is very, very rare to see a website's news section appear in Google News if the rest of the website is not news, if the rest of the website has another commercial purpose. It's not impossible, but it's very, very difficult. And generally I tell my clients it's not worth fighting that battle because you're going to lose to dedicated news websites who, who don't have any ambiguity and that Google feels very confident will produce good news and therefore can rank in Google's news ecosystem. So dedicated news is definitely the one big requirement and the rest is just about good behavior as a news publisher. Be explicit about what your topical strengths are, publish enough content. Unfortunately, we are in a scenario where volume is rewarded to a certain extent. If you have one news article a day, that's not going to fly. 10, 20, 30, more is better basically, but it does need to be newsworthy content. Uh, good internal linking, very fast server response time, because Google likes it when websites respond very quickly and Google can very quickly crawl them. You know, uh, when you look at your crawl stats report in Search Console, if your server response time is more than 500, 600 milliseconds, you might want to improve that.

Hmm.

It needs to be quite fast and responsive for Google to crawl it. And, and you generally don't confuse Google. And this is actually is a technical requirement, but Google never really makes it explicit, but in my experience, it's, it's probably the most important one. Don't use client-side JavaScript to load content. Oh, when Google indexes news articles, it's in a hurry. Google wants to index the article very quickly.

And so it's not rendered.

And generally Google skips the rendering phase and indexes the article based purely on the HTML. Now the rendering phase will happen eventually, most of the time, But at that stage, you know, the news cycle has already passed. Google will already have given that article its visibility in their news ecosystem. So your HTML source code needs to contain the full article and all the bells and whistles you want Google to see as part of that article. And you should not rely on client-side JavaScript for anything that should be an integral part of that article page.

Yeah, that's, that's super interesting. And regarding XML sitemaps, For news websites, how do they differ from like normal XML sitemaps?

Yeah, I mean, I'm always a fan of having regular XML sitemaps for my news clients as well, primarily because they give really good, uh, ways to troubleshoot indexing problems in Google Search Console. A news-specific XML sitemap is, is quite a different beast because it should only contain articles published in the last 48 hours. So whenever a new article is published, it should go directly into the news sitemap. And after 48 hours, 2 days, it should drop out of the Uh, plus there are specific extra attributes in the news sitemap that Google wants you to fill in. Like the name of the publication, the language of the article, the headline, the title of the article should be in there as well, as well as the publication date. Uh, not the last mod date, the publication date. Google wants to make sure that this is when it was actually published. So it's a bit more extensive. You get a lot more attributes per URL in, in a news XML sitemap. But at the same time, because it can only contain the articles published in the last 48 hours, it's a lot more limited. It's a fairly small sitemap. You know, depending on the scale of your operation, you can have several dozen, several hundred articles in there. There's also a limit of your News XML sitemap of 1,000 articles. Now, there's not many publishers that publish more than 1,000 articles in 48 hours, 500 articles a day, but there are some who do, and they will have multiple News XML sitemaps so that they can spread it out over multiple sites. But generally 1,000 articles for a single publication is, is enough, you know, 500 articles a day, 1,000 articles in 2 days. That's, it's a big news website that goes over that. But there are a few who I've worked with who have multiple XML sitemaps because they publish more than 500 articles on a daily basis.

Yeah. Cool. Cool. And how does Google handle duplicate content? How does Google know who is like the original reporter? Reporter? I heard, I heard a case that, someone publishes an article and then the other one publishes the same one but changes the date to be before, and then he's like the original source. Like, how does it work?

Google is very, very bad at filtering out duplicate content. In fact, it's so bad now they basically have admitted defeat on that. Um, Google now says if you syndicate your content to someone else, like you have your own articles and you let another publisher copy that, like with a syndication feed, That other publisher should put a noindex tag on that content.

Yeah. Yeah. I heard that, that, that's a relatively recent thing, I think. Yeah.

Because if, if they don't do that, if, if they just publish it, and even if it has a canonical tag pointing back to you, there's a really good chance that article is going to rank above your article in Google's news ecosystem. And that's because Google doesn't really do deduplication in news. Google actually doesn't really do deduplication very well at all in any of the ranking Google is very bad at handling duplicate content. Um, you know, they tell us not to publish duplicate content, but realistically you can get away with scraping an entire website and publishing on a different domain and it'll rank just fine. Google is very bad at detecting and filtering duplicate content, including in their news ecosystem. They're very bad at it. And because there's a lot of syndication happening among news publishers, Google accepts this as, you know, duplicate content will appear on multiple websites and there's no real danger for a publisher associated with that. There's no risk of getting penalized or anything like that unless you get a lot of DMCA copyright notices against you, in which case, you know, eventually Google's gonna kick you out of search results. But syndicated content generally is licensed. Therefore, you will never get a DMCA notice against you, and you can just rank for that content if you let Google crawl and index it. Um, and this is also a weakness that Google News has in that Google says they want to credit original publishers, but because of the nature of news, Google has a very strong preference for newer articles. And by newer, it, I'm not even talking about the publication date that you provide to Google. It's when Google first sees the article, because as far as Google is concerned, that's when the article is actually published. So when you write an article and you publish it, and then 20 minutes later it gets published on a competing website that has your syndication feed, Chances are that that article is going to outrank your article because Google thinks it's newer. And Google wants newer articles shown in their news-specific ecosystem because newer articles tend to be more accurate and users click more on an article that's 20 minutes old versus an article that's an hour old, because users know that the 20 minutes old might have the newest developments in that news story, whereas the article that's an hour old might already be outdated. So it's, it's an inherent weakness in Google and in Google News as well. And it's not something we as an industry have really come to grips with yet. It's still an ongoing and persistent problem.

Yeah, that's, that's interesting. And how does Google deal with fake news? Is it harder for websites? Probably it is too harder to get into Google News for websites who pro— which produce fake news, but it probably happens. Are there like any interesting cases or ways? Google deals with that. Yeah.

It's, uh, it's actually the reason why it's so hard to get into Google News.

Uh-huh.

Because Google is very hesitant to let a new website in there. Um, so I talk to clients who are really frustrated, like, why is Google not showing us? It's like, yeah, but that's the side effect of what Google is trying to do, which is only show reputable news websites. And I have to give Google credit. It is quite rare to see websites show up in, in top stories and in Google News that It very rarely happens. It used to happen quite a lot. It was a very common occurrence. Now it's quite rare and it gets even rarer because Google, you know, has put a lot of effort into finding the right signals there. The EEAT signals that, you know, everybody keeps harping on about, that is a very important aspect of Google's news ranking systems. And, and if you don't have things like good author pages and, and, and strong quality signals and topic authority signals, you're just not going to rank as a publisher.

Right.

So, uh, yeah. So I think for news, Google has more or less cracked that nut and is quite confident that it's showing proper news websites. If you launch a fake news website, you're not going to get traction in Google's news ecosystem. It's just not going to happen. You just don't have the right signals for Google to trust you in any way, shape, or form.

Yeah.

So yeah, that's the flip side of the coin of it being so difficult to get into Google News. It's difficult for that specific reason.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. Makes sense. And what are like the, the common mistakes you see news websites make when you are like hired to, to audit those sites? Like what are like common, common patterns you see?

Yeah. Like I said before, a lot of publishers think they can go in after they publish an article and tweak it and then realize that that doesn't work. So explain to them, no, no, you get one chance at this. So it's about building the right workflows. Um, Not using proper categorization and tagging is also a bit of an issue. I, I like using tag pages, but you have to have the right process for it. Uh, the, there's 2 extremes there when sometimes news websites don't use any tags or websites have way too many tags for everything. Yeah, exactly. You need to have a bit of a golden medium there and have a good process in place. I think tags are very valuable because they help show to Google what your expertise is as a publisher, what kind of topics you write about a lot. That's why your top navigation, your section pages, but also your tag pages play But you don't want a million tag pages either with like 1 or 2 articles per tag page. So there needs to be a bit of a process there where, you know, you can only create tag pages for topics that you have a certain amount of content around, like 5 or more articles. And also a process where you deprecate tag pages if there hasn't been a new article added to that for X amount of years. Basically say, right, maybe we need to delete that. Pagination is another common problem. Uh, not crawlable pagination. Um, again, when you have a topic page or a tag page and there's a show more button or a load more button or an infinite scroll that loads more articles and there isn't really a page 2 or page 3 for Google to crawl, you're not doing it right because Google wants to see a certain body of work. If you have a Joe Biden tag page and you show 10 articles to Google and then the rest is loaded by JavaScript. Then as far as Google is concerned, you only have 10 articles on Joe Biden. And that's not enough. That's, that's not enough for you to show your expertise, to show that, oh, we're good at covering Joe Biden. You need to let Google crawl multiple pages of content on a specific topic. But at the same time, you don't want to create too much crawl overhead for Google and have hundreds of thousands of pages of pagination. So again, it's about finding the happy medium, the golden ratio. Of having enough pagination, which is, you know, generally I say 20 to 30 articles per page, up to 10 pages. That's up to 300 articles, usually enough. You know, if you can do 10 pages of pagination with 30 articles per page, you're in a good place. But again, it's very context dependent on how often you publish or what your topical expertise is as a publisher. But it's a bit of a rule of thumb that they can start with to see if they're on the wrong side or the right side of that particular Um, and yeah, other than that, um, I think a lot of publishers don't use internal links particularly well. They don't do any linking internally or externally. And that's, I think, not a good habit either. Um, and, and publishers tend not to think really well about what their top navigation should be. Top navigation is, is more of a political battle internally rather than— Um, you know, a signpost of what your main categories of content actually are, your strengths as a publisher. And it's important to make sure that your top navigation reflects your output as a publisher and that it's not because that guy plays golf with the CEO, that's why you get a link for your section in the top nav. No, it should really be aligned with what you as a publisher are really good at covering. And those topics should be reflected in your top navigation.

Okay. Okay. Makes sense. And what about author? Did you notice that it matters, it influences rankings, uh, if some well-known journalist wrote an article as opposed to, to there is no information about the author or the author is unknown?

Um, it's fairly anecdotal evidence. I do recommend publishers have good author pages and, and, you know, make sure that the, the people that write for that website are real people, that Google knows that they're real people. Link to social media, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter profiles, those sorts of things. Have a real photo there and not some anonymous avatar, a proper bio that lists that particular reporter's expertise. But it's an indirect signal. I don't think it's a direct ranking factor for articles. I don't see any evidence for that. I do think it's an indirect quality signal that goes into the overall evaluation of the website. The same with having a really good About Us page that lists key staff, having a really good editorial policy where you tell Both your readers and Google, like we're an independent publisher. This is how we make money. This is the kind of content we produce, and this is how you can trust us as a publisher. These are all very indirect signals, quite subjective signals as well. But I do think they play a role. I think when a website does not have them, they tend to fall on the wrong side of core algorithm updates. And if you do then implement them, you tend to bounce back after the next core algorithm update. So it is something that Google tends to look at, but it's more part of the core updates that Google rolls out and whether or not you have that quality checkmark associated with your website.

Okay, cool, cool. Interesting. And walk me now through like how exactly your job looks like. How does SEO for news websites look like? Like what do you do on a daily basis? Like what tasks? Yeah. What are your tasks? Super interested.

It varies quite a lot. I think most of my work is site audits, site audits for news publishers, both, you know, all bells and whistles site audits, as well as like focused audits for like technical SEO. So I think that would be the body of my work. I also do a lot of training sessions, editorial training sessions for news desks and editors and technical training sessions on occasion for development teams and product teams and a lot of what I call ad hoc consulting. Consulting where the client just wants me available whenever they have an interesting question or an interesting challenge and they can send me an email or talk to me on Slack or whatever it is. Some clients want me to have like a regular catch-up call with them once every 2 weeks, once every month to talk about the latest things that have been happening and the initiatives that they've launched or other things that they have in the pipeline. And once or twice a year, I get a really interesting focused project as in, oh, we're launching a new platform or a new website. Can you help us with that? You know, or we're making a major CMS change on our publishing website. Can you help us along with that process? So yeah, those tend to be the types of things that I do. But at the same time, I try not to box myself in in terms of ways of working. Whatever fits with the client's ways of working, where my expertise is needed. and, and how I can contribute to that. I try to be quite flexible about that.

Yeah, sure. And I was, I was browsing your website before, before we started, and I noticed one article. It, it said technical SEO is absolutely necessary. So can you tell me why?

Yeah, that's an old article actually. I wrote that back in 2015, I think. Um, and that was a bit of a—

I think it showed, it showed us 20 I think.

Yeah, no, I republished it on my own website because I wrote it for another website and I couldn't find it on that other website again. So I thought, let's just republish it on my own. And I republished it because I read through it and realized that it's still more or less true. I think, I mean, back in 2015, content marketing was all the hype. Everybody was all over that and people thought, ah, we don't really need to worry about tech SEO anymore. You know, it's not that important. And I was like, hang on a minute. No, that's not true. If, if your content isn't being crawled and indexed properly, then, then no matter how good the content is, it's not going to rank. You're not gonna get any traffic. Um, so I wrote that article sort of a response to that and also in a bit of an explainer of how you can learn technical SEO. You know, I don't think that SEOs need to be coders. I don't think everybody needs to learn Python or JavaScript. I do think knowing HTML is very, very useful as an SEO.

Yeah. Totally.

I think if you don't know HTML, you are going to have a disadvantage. I think you can still be successful in other areas of SEO, like link building and, and content writing, but knowing HTML just gives you that extra edge because the web where we work, we build websites, we build webpages, we optimize webpages, is HTML. It's not JavaScript, it's not Python, it's HTML. The web is still HTML. Browsers process HTML primarily. So knowing HTML is very important. I think understanding client-server infrastructure as well, because the web is a client-server model, it helps a little bit if you understand how a browser gets data from a website and vice versa. And other aspects there as well in terms of using web servers, web server configurations. This has become less and less important though, I have to admit. Back in 2015, everybody had an Apache website that ran WordPress, and .htaccess was part of the Apache configuration system. And knowing how to build .htaccess rules was quite useful. Nowadays, almost everybody is on an NGINX server when they run WordPress, and NGINX doesn't have .htaccess. And also, we don't really need to worry too much about those sorts of granular configurations anymore, because it tends to be built in correctly from the start. So that's less valuable than it was then.

Yeah.

And again, I'm showing my age here because it's old school SEO, old school technical web development stuff there a bit. But I still think that, you know, good websites need a good technical underpinning. I think we're helped to a large degree that off-the-shelf content management platforms like WordPress and Wix and Duda, especially Wix and Duda, I should say, are quite good out of the box when it comes to tech SEO.

Mm-hmm.

Shopify as well for e-commerce is quite good out of the box and you don't really need to worry too much about tech SEO. Uh, and the things that the platform can't do, unfortunately, you tend to run into a wall there because there's very little configuration effort. But on the other hand, because they're so good out of the box, you probably won't run into those walls in the first place. And for most small businesses, having a website from Shopify or Wix is perfectly valid. And, you know, it used to be that that was a cheap and nasty way to launch your website. And now it's quite a sensible way to launch your website because it has a lot of capabilities out of the box and you don't really need to worry about the technical SEO. You can focus more on the on-page SEO and the link building stuff of it. But as websites get bigger and more complex, you tend not to be able to use those sorts of platforms anymore, and you tend to go for custom-built solutions or bigger CMSs. Uh, and that's where technical SEO becomes very, very important. And you need to make sure that certain functionality that you sort of take for granted with one of those off-the-shelf platforms is also built into these custom systems that maybe don't necessarily have those same things built in from scratch. So, you know, you need to make sure you do a lot of research about the capabilities of a platform before you start using it and what it can and what it can't do and what maybe you need to make it do and build into that.

Yeah.

I do find myself falling a bit out of love with WordPress though. I used to be a big fan of WordPress because out of the box with like one or two plugins, it did all you need to do. But it's become such a beast of a system. It's just, you know, it's almost too much and it's hard to optimize and it's very easy to get plugin bloat.

Yeah.

And also with the newest editors that they have, like Gutenberg, I am not a fan. But that's, again, I'm just used maybe to the old way of working there. But I think it's, you know, the intention that WordPress had and probably still has, has always been very good. But the way that they have gone about it the last few years, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure it's the right direction. I think they try to be too much to too many different people, and instead they should maybe just focus on being like a small to medium business website platform rather than being the be-all and end-all of, of CMSs.

Yeah. Yeah, totally agree. And one final question. Do you see news websites using ChatGPT to write news, and how is it working out?

I have an interesting thing to share here. AI-written content for news has been around for 10-15 years already.

Like Google is rewriting, right?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Take a financial news website. Every time a particular stock jumps up and down by a few points, or there's a profit announcement, Hundreds of articles appear like that, and very few of those are written by humans. It's auto-generated content, and that content, that type of content has been around for 10, 15, 20 years. ChatGPT just makes that content better. Websites have, news websites have, to different extents, always made use of AI-written content. We just didn't used to call it AI content. It was just auto-generated content. Content. And this is the type of content that you can generate based on numbers. If you have a few numbers, like a financial statement that you feed in, the machine will feed out a narrative, an article that reads well, that looks like it's written by an actual reporter, that just reports on what those numbers mean. Now, there can be, like I said, changes in the stock market, changes in exchange rates, changes in values of commodities, things like that. And that content that gets churned out and gets sent out to to specifically financial publications because there's a big demand for that. There's millions of people trading in commodities, trading in stock, trading in foreign currencies all the time, and they need to read that sort of content. They want to read the latest news on that stock or market or that commodity exchange, whatever it is. So that has always been a part of the financial news system for literally decades. Now with ChatGPT, the content is a lot better. It always, you sort of knew when you were reading a machine-generated piece of content, it was very formulaic, followed the same structure again and again. With ChatGPT, that makes it a bit more fluid, a bit more human, if you will, and makes it a bit more digestible. But the core essence is still the same. The thing that I think some journalists are worried about is that ChatGPT is going to report the news, and that's not going to happen.

Yeah.

ChatGPT, no matter how smart it is, it will not predict what happens in Ukraine tomorrow. tomorrow. It just can't. There will always be the need for journalists, reporters to take those facts and create the news around it. ChatGPT will read that and then people can go to ChatGPT and get a summary of what happened in the last week or even the last day, but it can't make the news. It can only report on what's already been reported. That first level of reporting still needs to be done by humans. So I think, you know, So the type of journalism that is under threat from ChatGPT is the type of journalism that's already been more or less replaced by machines for a long time. And what it actually makes it easier for news publishers to focus on reporting real news, because it makes the reporting on those sorts of very basic numbers-based fluctuations an almost fully automated process that doesn't cost them a lot of money. So they can free up resources to do proper news reporting. reporting, proper investigative journalism, proper insight and analysis. So for me, it's, it's not a threat. If anything, it's a liberation of journalism.

Okay, cool. So Barry, where can people find you? I know you have very nice newsletter. I am its subscriber, but what's the best place to connect with you?

Thank you. Thank you. Yes, my newsletter is seoforgooglenews.com. I don't write very regularly. I know I should write more often, but it takes a lot of time to write a good edition, as you know. So it's something that has to come whenever I find the time to do that. I'm still on Twitter. I haven't abandoned the platform yet, even though, you know, it's not what it used to be. I'm on Adams, B-A-D-A-M-S, on Twitter. Website is polemicdigital.com. I have an open email policy for any SEO-related questions. If people want to ask me anything about SEO, specifically news SEO, Always fill in the contact form or send me an email at barry@polemicdigital.com. I'll do my best to respond. It might not be quick, but I'll always give you a response. And I'm on LinkedIn as well, you know, because everybody seems to flock to LinkedIn now because it's probably the least worst of all the social media platforms now. It used to be the worst of the lot, and now it's maybe the best of the lot, ironically.

What about Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads?

Yeah, I'm on Mastodon. I'm on Bluesky. I'm not on Threads. because I am not on any Meta-owned platform. I'm not on Facebook, not Instagram, not WhatsApp. And that's a very deliberate choice that I have. So I will never be found on Threads. If you see anything on Threads from Barry Adams, it's not me. It's somebody pretending to be me or maybe some other dude called Barry Adams, because there's thousands of us all around the world.

Okay. Okay, cool. So Barry, thank you so much for spending this time with me and sharing so much, so much knowledge. It was really awesome to have you here. Yeah.

Thank you very much for having me, Olga. I really enjoyed this.

Yeah. Cool. So thanks everyone and see you in the next episode. Bye-bye.