SEO For News Publishers -- Barry Adams // Polemic Digital

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Welcome to the Voices of Search podcast, an I Hear Everything production. In this podcast, we'll share the news, knowledge, and strategies you need to to navigate the ever-changing world of SEO. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.

Welcome to the Voices of Search podcast. My name is Tyson Stockton from Previsible.io, and today we're going to be continuing the conversation with Barry Adams on SEO for News Publisher. Who is a specialized SEO consultant for news publishers at Polemic Digital, which is a specialized SEO consultancy providing services to news publishers around the world. They've worked with many of the world's largest media brands as well as niche and local publishers, helping them grow through organic search traffic. And with that, let's jump right into the topic on SEO for news publishers. Barry, welcome back to the podcast.

Thank you very much, Tyson. Great to be here.

Now, yesterday we were talking more in the vein of generative AI, but we're starting to hit a little bit on kind of more general topics within SEO for news publishers. To set the stage again for the listeners, what unique challenges do you see for news and media publishers that may be a little more heightened or a little bit different than other brands or other companies in regards to SEO?

I think the single biggest difference between SEO for news versus what I call classic SEO is that SEO for news, you get one shot for an article to get traction in Google's news-specific ecosystem. The way Google crawls and indexes news articles is very rapid. Google is very much geared towards speed when it comes to finding and ranking news stories, which makes sense because news moves very fast. But the side effect of that is that the moment you as a publisher have put an article online, Google will find it and index it pretty much straight away. And any changes you then make to the article later on, a few minutes, a few hours later, to try and optimize it further or try to get a second chance at visibility in Google News or top stories boxes, is not likely to be seen by Google until many hours or sometimes days later, at which stage it's not a news article anymore. And it's seen as an older article and you will have lost the opportunity to show up in Google's news-specific ecosystem. So a lot of SEOs publish an article online and then will make tweaks and changes to it to try and build long-term value and build up rankings and then constantly improve it. And that approach does not work in news. It's very unlikely to have any success in news. You basically have to make sure that your article is as optimized as you can make it before you click the publish button. Because if you then publish it and then start adding SEO aspects to it, you've pretty much missed your opportunity. And it's not likely Google is going to revisit that article on time to see those changes and to give that article a better opportunity in Google's news-specific ecosystem. Plus, of course, the lifespan of an article is quite short in Google's news ecosystem. You know, in Google News, the Google vertical news.google.com, An article has a couple of days, sometimes a couple of weeks at most, if it's not a particularly competitive topic of visibility. The same in the news tab on Google Search. But for most publishers, most organic search traffic to their websites will come from top stories carousels on regular search results. That is by far the biggest single source of traffic to most news clients. And those top stories carousels. Have a very strong preference for newer articles. An article that's, that's 2 days or older will generally not show up in those top stories boxes anymore. You know, it's about a maximum lifespan of 48 hours we tend to see, sometimes a bit longer if there's not a lot of competition in the top stories box, or if you're a highly authoritative publisher, you can have a slightly longer shelf life for your articles in top stories. But generally speaking, after You know, 24 hours, most articles will have been replaced in a top stories box with new articles. And that of course makes sense because news constantly evolves. Uh, new events are being covered, new articles are being written. So Google has a pretty strong preference for newer articles in their Google News ecosystem, especially on top stories boxes versus older articles. Because, you know, Google's users expect the latest news on a topic when, when they do a search. So it's that very high churn and very short lifespan of articles that makes SEO so critical to be done before an article is published so that an article has the maximum chance of appearing in Google's news ecosystem the moment it's published. And you just can't go back later to an article, to a news article, and optimize it further because it's probably not going to have much of an impact. It's something you want to get right At the start, which is why it also needs to be an integral part of your publishing workflow as a news publisher to make sure some SEO is applied before that article makes it onto the website.

No, that's a, it's a huge challenge though, because I feel like as SEOs, like we have this breathing room and a lot of times you hear best practices of revisiting articles, doing further iterations to them, like you're Continually strengthening and improving those kind of key pages. And to your point, within news and media, you have that one chance, time of the essence. So obviously you're not wanting to delay the process. You don't want to delay publication of a news article because of SEO elements. What are some best practices or recommendations that you would have for the listeners to ensure that when an article is going live, that it is fully optimized or you're doing everything you can at the onset and the publication of that article.

Yeah, it's also important to understand as part of that, that the ranking factors for a news article are slightly different than those for classic SEO, the 10 blue links, evergreen as we call it in the news industry. For a news article, the most important ranking factor is the headline. And I'm specifically talking about the headline that's, that's part of the news article structured data, as well as the one that's visible on the article itself. Contrary to like classic SEO, where we tend to look primarily at the SEO title, the title tag, that title tag in news is, as far as I understand it, a negligible ranking factor. It's not something Google takes into account as part of the news articles optimization. Google looks primarily at the actual headline of the article. And you can have a different title tag versus a headline, by the way. Some publishers are quite good at that. They have the opportunity to different SEO titles versus visible headlines. And then the visible headline is perhaps the one that feeds into top stories, that feeds into the news article structured data. So it's about optimizing the headline. It's about optimizing the opening paragraph as well. But the actual biggest ranking factor for individual articles in Google's news ecosystem is the overall topic authority that that publishing website has built up around that topic. Because Google wants to make sure it ranks content from reputable sources. So the reputation of a publishing website and the specialty of the publishing website, website, basically the classic E-A-T factors we talk about so often nowadays in SEO, they play a very big role in the news ecosystem. So as a publisher, you have to get 2 things right, which are somewhat conflicting in certain ways. You have to make sure that that pretty live, real-time aspect of SEO is embedded into your processes so that every journalist who has the power to publish an article onto the website knows what is sort of the minimum they need to do to actually optimize an article and make sure that it has the best opportunity to rank in Google News and Top Stories. And at the same time, a publisher needs to know what they need to do to build that long-term topic authority, that long-term authority and trust that Google is also looking for in the news-specific ecosystem. So it's 2 different strands of SEO that have to collaborate and simultaneously be implemented on a website that focuses on news so that you get the short-term opportunity opportunity to appear as high as possible in top stories boxes. And you're also sending those long-term signals that Google is looking for that can elevate your content in the long run in Google's ecosystem.

And now going on within that same vein and topical authority, and I actually just the other day I was looking at a friend of mine's website and kind of in a niche sector within news and media publishing, and it's within kind of like the food industry and news related to that. And one of the things I was going over is I was looking at their site architecture and URL structure and how they were using probably not the, at least from my perspective, the ideal directory structure from that. Like, how big of an impact do you see that site structure and internal linking playing into that topical authority in addition to the type of content that a website's putting out?

Yeah, there's multiple different aspects that play a role there. The actual URL is probably one of the least important ranking elements. The more important ones are things like the top navigation and the labels that you use on your top navigation, as well as any sub-navigation that you might use on your website. It's about usability of the website as well and how clearly you guide users through your website with very clear navigation links, very clear breadcrumb trails, and good internal linking and using the correct naming conventions. You have to make sure that when someone arrives on your news website's homepage, they are intuitively aware of what you do as a website and what the purpose of your website is. And this is true beyond just news, of course. This is true for all websites. Sometimes you have these discussions with people who work in marketing or branding who want to do something new and interesting and edgy and have funny, interesting names for site sections. And That could work to a certain extent, but it tends not to work in search, in SEO, because Google looks at your site structure, your site navigation, as the main indicators of what you do as a website, what the purpose of your website is. So you have to have very clear labels around the topics that you cover, and the labels of those links need to match with how people search for and understand that topic. And the moment you try to do something different and find an alternative way of presenting your website and your website structure to users, there's a very real risk that you're deviating from how users understand topics and how users search for topics versus how your website is structured. So it's one of the reasons why a lot of news websites, if not all news websites, have fairly similar site structures with similar labeling, because that's how people understand these topics. That's how people will navigate through the website and click on sections and subsections to find the news that they're looking for. And of course, the websites are aligned with that to give the maximum visibility in Google's ecosystem. And that's of course also how Google interprets topic authority. If you have a section on your website about, for example, US politics, Google understands that if that section is populated with a lot of articles and there's a constant feed of new articles there, that is one of the signals that Google uses to determine your topic authority on the topic of US politics. But if you have a very different name for that, like for example, Views from the Hill, that doesn't align with how Google and users understand the topic of US politics. It might work for like Washington insiders who know it's called the Hill, but most of your readers are probably not going to be political insiders. So that doesn't make sense to the general audience. And therefore that sort of labeling isn't conducive to having a good footprint in Google and to get users on board with reading your website as well.

Interesting. Any other kind of general elements? And maybe going back to getting everything right when something going online, how significant and what kind of strategies have you seen around kind of like SEO education to the content creators, whether it's ensuring the titles are optimized for Google News or just ensuring that some of those elements are done right from the onset?

I think the key aspect there is to make journalists and content creators understand that SEO isn't there to pollute their craft, isn't there to ruin everything that they do, but is there to enhance it. I think historically journalists have actually always optimized their headlines, but in a slightly different context. Journalists tended to optimize headlines for visibility on the newsstand so that when someone walked past the newsstand and saw the headlines on the front of a newspaper, one of them would grab their eye and they would end up buying that newspaper. With SEO, it's not just about the headlines on the front page of a newspaper. It's about every single headline. And every single headline is an opportunity to grab someone's eye and ensure you get that click. The trick is that there's a different middleman here. It's not the newsstand, it's the search engine. And the search engine needs to give that article visual prominence to show it to users so that you get an opportunity to get that click. And that's what SEO for news publishers is about, to make sure that Google understands what the article is about and Google feels it's worthy of appearing in that top stories box, which is the modern-day newsstand for a lot of news publishers. So it's not about polluting journalism, it's about enhancing journalism and making sure that with a few little tweaks, you can give your articles significantly more chances of acquiring the traffic that you want it to get. You don't have to unlearn all of journalism to become a good SEO for news articles. It's quite the contrary. If you have a journalistic background, this stuff is actually generally quite easy. Because it's little things you need to do a bit different than maybe what you're used to. Rather than just saying Biden in the headline, maybe you do President Biden or Joe Biden. Like little things to make it a bit more explicit. That is enough for Google to fully appreciate and understand what the article is about and give that article the best possible opportunity to rank. So it's little things like that. And also maybe avoiding things like word gags, which a lot of journalists are quite a fan of to play a bit around with words. Google generally doesn't have a sense of humor, so trying to be funny doesn't work in search. Works great in print, by all means keep doing that for the print versions of your articles, but for search you might need to have a slightly different headline there that is a bit more explicit and a bit clearer signaling what the article is about. But the same core journalistic principles apply. It's not like we have to radically rethink journalism in this online-only era. It's more that we have to evolve journalism slightly towards being a little bit clearer, a little bit more explicit in terms of what an article is going to be about. But the rest, Google wants to reward high-quality content. Google wants to reward proper journalism. And as long as you always start from that foundation, then as a news website, I do strongly feel in the long run you will get there and you will be rewarded in the end because That's what Google wants to show to its users, reputable content from reputable sources. And if you as a publisher committed to that ideal, then I think in the long run, you will always get there.

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Interesting. In a similar piece, and I think you, you hit on this in some regards, but I feel like in conversations I've had with journalists, a lot of times there's that legacy kind of bad taste in their mouth as far as like, oh, SEOs, just keyword stuffing and adding keywords in. And it's this general mindset around, oh yeah, it's just wanting me to repeat the certain phrase again and again, or kind of trying to control my creative freedom within the writing. What recommendations would you have maybe to in-house SEOs or other SEOs that are running into those, let's call it legacy distaste for SEO practices?

I think the proof is always in the pudding. I mean, no matter how grumpy an old-school journalist gets about having to do this SEO malarkey, if you show them the potential of the traffic it can get to their articles and how many more readers they can get, that sort of criticism does tend to evaporate quite quickly. You can even do a bit of A/B split testing, like one week you write articles your way, the next week you write them in a bit more SEO-optimized way and see what happens then. So, you know, it's about trying to find ways to overcome those barriers. Not by antagonizing journalists and saying, oh, you're wrong, but about just nudging them in the right direction and highlighting the positive aspects of what good SEO tactics can do for them without them having to discard decades of history in the craft of journalism. And some publishers do this really, really well. Some publishers have really good homemade data systems and web analytics systems that almost gamify the process of optimizing articles where you get live feeds on your journalism dashboards of which articles are doing really well in which site sections and where that traffic is coming from. And that can help make journalists quite enthusiastic about achieving really good results for their own articles. And it's not necessarily about chasing after clicks, although some publishers go and do that as well. And I don't think that's a viable long-term tactic. It's not something Google wants to reward either. But it's more about, again, starting from your own journalistic principles as a publisher, what you can do to get the maximum amount of eyeballs on your articles, because that's what every journalist in the end wants. They want their content to be read. And for that content to have an impact, the best impact you can make with content is if a lot of people read it and a lot of people take that message on board and hopefully do something with that. And SEO and search in general is nowadays probably the biggest single source of traffic and readership for most news publishers. So you have to sort of play that game to a certain extent and go along with that and find ways to make your content as appealing as possible for the search engines and long-term outcome of getting more readers, more eyeballs on your content.

Excellent. Any, any last words or recommendations that you'd like to leave the listeners with in regards to SEO within news and publishing?

Yeah, the thing we haven't really talked about yet is the technical aspect of SEO for news publishing. This is also an area that sets news publishers apart somewhat from classic websites because news websites the sheer volume of content that they produce tend to become very large websites very quickly. So things like optimizing for crawling and having very fast load speeds are probably a bit more important for news websites than they are for classic websites. Plus the fact that how fast Google wants to index news stories means that the rendering phase of Google's indexing, wherever Google executes client-side JavaScript, tends to be too slow for Google, which means you have to have the full content of an article in the pure HTML source code before the client client-side JavaScript is executed. So there's little technical things as well that a news publisher needs to get in order to maximize their interaction with Google's crawling and indexing systems and make sure they don't put any boundaries in place there for Google to process their content and start ranking it straight away. And things like news article structured data as well, things like having the right images defined on your articles with the right aspect ratios and the right sizes, that also has an impact in the visibility that the website has in Google News and top stories and in the Discover feed, which is not a huge source of traffic for a lot of news publishers. So the journalism, of course, is always front and center, but you have to start from a very sound technical foundation on your website. And if that technical foundation is not in place, then your journalism is probably not going to achieve the maximum potential.

Excellent point. And maybe just one more question since you hit on it there. Any general recommendations that you have around how to treat legacy content? Because given the nature, new and publishing, a lot of content, especially if the company's been around for a while, how do you kind of approach that from a— I mean, you touched on crawl bandwidth of the site with dealing with this volume of content. How do you think about kind of the older legacy content that a publisher might have?

Yeah, I am not a fan of removing old content. I think old content actually plays an important role, especially when it comes to the establishing of your topic authority as a website. If you remove old content, you're basically also removing your journalistic history of reporting on those topics that that content covers, and it might undermine your topic authority. Plus, let's be honest, Google is quite smart about where it assigns its crawl efforts generally. Sometimes you need to guide it along a little bit. But older content, Google doesn't spend a lot of time crawling those because if you publish an article in 2004 and you haven't changed it since then, Google knows you haven't changed it since 2004. It might occasionally check the article to see if anything's changed, but it's not going to spend a lot of time crawling that. I think the best way you can make sure that Google continues focusing its crawling on your homepage, your section pages, and finding new articles is to build smart but crawlable pagination into your section pages and your category pages so that you have like 20, 30 articles articles on the page, and then there's a link to page 2, and then again, 30 articles there, and then there's a link to page 3. And then with every layer of pagination, you're going deeper into the website, into older articles. And because those paginated pages are then further removed from the homepage, they are seen as less valuable for Google, and therefore Google will spend less effort crawling them, but they are still accessible and Google can still crawl them to see the full history of content you've written around those topics that your section, category, and tag pages are about. So I am a fan of keeping old content on the website with proper crawlable and indexable pagination and not removing it just because you think it might consume crawl budget, because chances are it's not consuming crawl budget. Chances are Google is already quite aware of where it should be focusing its crawl efforts. And you don't really have to, you know, start deleting content by the tens of thousands in some vain attempt to try and make Google focus more on the content that is just published because Google already does that, and you might be causing more harm to your website than you're helping it.

That's an excellent, excellent point. But it does bring up one more question on my side, just because I've heard this question a lot from SEOs. So I feel like it could offer a lot of value. Within pagination, what is your preference? Or what is your recommendation on how to treat that from canonicals, next, previous? Like, what's your recommendation on how to handle pagination on those pages.

Yeah, paginated content is not duplicate content. Page 2 will have different content on it than page 3 and page 4. So the canonical should always be self-referential. The canonical for page 2 of a list should point to page 2. Canonical for page 3 should point to page 3, etc., etc. I think you can help Google along a little bit. Google doesn't use rel prev, rel next anymore, but I think Bing still uses it. So it might still be worth having that in your meta tags. I think it's also a fairly decent accessibility thing to have. But, you know, just have a very good URL pattern for paginated content, either with a parameter like page=2, page=3, or with a subfolder structure, /page/2, /page/3, so that the URL pattern very clearly indicates that it's a paginated series. And the same if you have a headline or a title tag on the paginated page, it helps if you put the page number in there as well. Again, it's an extra sign that Google understands that it's a paginated series. But you don't want to canonicalize to the main page because page 2 is not a duplicate of the main page. It has different articles shown there. So why would you canonicalize to the main page? It's a flawed canonicalization signal, and Google will then be more inclined to see other implementations of canonical tags on your website as flawed implementations as well. So it might just decide to ignore all your canonicals altogether because you're implementing it the wrong way. Canonical tags are primarily there if you have 2 identical pages with different URLs so that Google can pick one of those 2 versions. And a paginated series is not identical. They're not identical pages. So they should not canonicalize to the first page. You should always have self-referential canonicals on every single one of your paginated pages.

Excellent. I think that's super helpful for the listeners out there. With that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks to Barry Adams, specialized SEO consultant for news publishers at Polemic Digital. If you'd like to learn more about Barry, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. Be sure to subscribe to his newsletter for regular updates from Barry about SEO for Google News, and that website is seoforgooglenews.com.

Okay. Thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is Tyson Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is previsible.io. That's P-R-E-V-I-S-I-B-L-E dot I-O. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our podcast. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is Voices of Search on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben J. Shapp, B-E-N-J-S-H-A-P. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, Until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.