Google has released a slight algorithm change to its SEO function for Google search (another in a long list of constant changes) that is once again aimed at making Google News and other search functions more open to journalism rather than articles that are optimised to get the best search results.
This basically means that adding “Kate Middleton pictures” or “iPhone 5” into your title won’t have as much power on the rankings as it used to have for websites, so we may see a slight improvement in websites listing off key words and triggers just to get more hits!
Google has stressed that they are looking to “empower news writers to express their stories freely” by removing some of the power of the title of an online news segment and to add in a news_keywords metatag tool, along with its existing algorithms.
Google states: “The news_keywords metatag is intended as a tool — but high-quality reporting and interesting news content remain the strongest ways to put your newsroom’s work in front of Google News users.”
“Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text.” And continues that ”news keywords such as “stocks”, “stock market”, or “crash” would be helpful in allowing Google News to better understand the article content for ranking without forcing the editors to water down the creativity of a great headline. Because the metatag appears only as part of the HTML code of a page, visitors to a site won’t ever see the magic under the hood”
Google are constantly changing their search system and adding new algorithms on a monthly basis to keep SEO “experts” and abusers at bay, but still the users will continue to find ways to abuse systems surrounding posting information online.
But for the moment it’s a start, and with Google showing that they are constantly looking to improve their, service there is still hope for a bit of good old independent journalism.
You can see the full information on the Google News Blog here.
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