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Basil's avatar

Loved the mention about Algorithm not working for New Publishers. Always great to see leading SEOs voice publishers concern.

I can reliably confirm nobody has surfaced in this new system. Google has accepted atleast 2 newsrooms including CNN Brasil into Google News Initiative but refused to allow them into Google News.

Can of Worms Algorithm!!!

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Basil's avatar

Even though the News Tab drives less traffic I am pretty sure it has a major influence on Top Stories and Discover.

Scrappers have been able to surface in Top Stories but new Publishers including CNN Brasil haven't.

The difference is Google News as the domain of the scrapper was manually approved in the Old Era.

Rest we all know we'll who should be surfacing in Top Stories who shouldn't. The parallel system of algorithms will deeply expose the flaws in the algorithms.

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Mohit Pathria's avatar

I am just waiting for the day when i get newsletter from you, saying finally new news sites are started to appear in google news section and top stories.

I think maybe this is because of U.S elections, maybe google has a lot of pressure because of the elections.

So when biden will finally become the president of US google will start indexing new news sites into the google news.

What do you think?

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Barry Adams's avatar

Could be, the election has been a very sensitive period for the media and perhaps Google wanted to err on the side of caution. Hopefully with the election done, and with all the complaining from publishers, Google will look at letting new websites into News.

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Jon's avatar

Is there any way at all to know which traffic came from Top Stories?

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Barry Adams's avatar

Unfortunately not, it just gets classified as 'Google organic' with no way to differentiate Top Stories from regular results.

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Scott Purcell - manofmany.com's avatar

Thanks so much for your insights Barry! We are unfortunately one of those news publications who's content is not surfacing in Google News. I've shared some of thoughts, analysis and concerns here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/101246095?hl=en#

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Eric's avatar

Barry, thank you for all this valuable content. Have there been any changes on this matter?

I mean, in getting into Google News.

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