Hi Barry, many thanks for your splendid work with the News SEO newsletter. Would you please elaborate a bit about why the meta <title> is so low in your importance ranking? Thanks in advance!
Hi Giancampo - for any context outside of Google News & Top Stories, the <title> is in fact the most important ranking factor. However, for news articles in Google News & Top Stories, I don't think Google pays much attention to the <title>. Instead the headline from the NewsArticle structured data is taken as the main ranking factor.
Often you see news sites like the NYT have very different <title> tags than their on-page headline, which can also be different from the headline attribute in the NewsArticle structured data. In my experience, Google places the most weight on the structured data headline and mostly ignores the <title> tag for Google News & Top Stories.
Of course for regular Google rankings you will want to make sure your <title> is fully optimised, as it's the strongest ranking factor there.
Amazing article, Barry. If I have 2 site maps on my site, one for main site and one for news and submit both to GSC, how will google know whether an article I publish is for the news site map or if it’s for the main one? We publish several articles a week, both news and evergreen guides.
Google easily figures it out. It checks both sitemaps regularly to find new URLs, and it doesn't matter if a URL is listed in just one or in both XML sitemaps.
Ideally all your news articles appear straight away in your news sitemap, and also in your regular sitemap.
Having said that, in my experience those sitemaps are nice to have but not crucial. Google's main discovery mechanism for newly published articles is still crawling your website - especially your homepage and main section pages.
Hi Barry! Thank you for this article, super helpful! I have a question about changing URL's structure: if I change a standard of article URL, for example: www.example.com/sports/last-news/2020/11/22/article-title.html to www.example.com/sports/2020/11/22/article-title.html, and don't change the legacy, starting publishing in this new way now, but I don't change like the section /sports/ itself or even /sports/last-news/, do you think it could mess the way Google sees our structure? Thank you =)
Hi Barry, many thanks for your splendid work with the News SEO newsletter. Would you please elaborate a bit about why the meta <title> is so low in your importance ranking? Thanks in advance!
Hi Giancampo - for any context outside of Google News & Top Stories, the <title> is in fact the most important ranking factor. However, for news articles in Google News & Top Stories, I don't think Google pays much attention to the <title>. Instead the headline from the NewsArticle structured data is taken as the main ranking factor.
Often you see news sites like the NYT have very different <title> tags than their on-page headline, which can also be different from the headline attribute in the NewsArticle structured data. In my experience, Google places the most weight on the structured data headline and mostly ignores the <title> tag for Google News & Top Stories.
Of course for regular Google rankings you will want to make sure your <title> is fully optimised, as it's the strongest ranking factor there.
This is an amzing read, Thank you for your time.
Hi Barry, I am planning to create a query parameter based structure on my blog. Example - www.example.com/fixed_news_page.html?id=2539152849
id parameter will change, the rest will be the same. I know its bad, I need to know will it be taken in Google News?
I *think* it will be indexed and could rank in Google News, but I'm not 100% confident.
Amazing article, Barry. If I have 2 site maps on my site, one for main site and one for news and submit both to GSC, how will google know whether an article I publish is for the news site map or if it’s for the main one? We publish several articles a week, both news and evergreen guides.
Google easily figures it out. It checks both sitemaps regularly to find new URLs, and it doesn't matter if a URL is listed in just one or in both XML sitemaps.
Ideally all your news articles appear straight away in your news sitemap, and also in your regular sitemap.
Having said that, in my experience those sitemaps are nice to have but not crucial. Google's main discovery mechanism for newly published articles is still crawling your website - especially your homepage and main section pages.
Hi Barry! Thank you for this article, super helpful! I have a question about changing URL's structure: if I change a standard of article URL, for example: www.example.com/sports/last-news/2020/11/22/article-title.html to www.example.com/sports/2020/11/22/article-title.html, and don't change the legacy, starting publishing in this new way now, but I don't change like the section /sports/ itself or even /sports/last-news/, do you think it could mess the way Google sees our structure? Thank you =)
I think that should be fine and wouldn't cause any issues - especially if you keep the legacy URLs and section URLs the same.
Nice! Thank you, Barry! :)
Hi Thanks for shearing this google news its my website https"//devquiretimes.com and its about news how to add this website in google news list