Small businesses often maximize online visibility by taking advantage of Google News, writing press releases regularly to ensure that they appear on aggregated headlines of Google. Local businesses also take advantage of this feature to rank higher for selected keywords that are targeted in their areas. Distributed in over 20 languages, being exposed in Google News can greatly affect the online visibility of a local business.
Not all news publishers are knowledgeable on the appropriate practices to rank high on Google News however, and Andrew Shotland of Search Engine Land enumerates 10 negative factors that can greatly affect rankings on Google News.
1. Duplicate content – In web SEO, duplicate content is frowned upon because it aims to dupe not only thevisitors but search engine crawlers as well. In Google News, duplicate content, especially plagiarized content, is a big no-no. Those that “borrow” content are found by Google and the search engine is getting better in tracking the original source.
2. Abstract headlines – Headlines should be clear, brief, and keyword specific. Vague headlines can negatively affect your Google News ranking because they don’t target relevant keywords. This is why creativity comes into play when writing headlines.
3. Absence of Google News sitemaps – This is easy to implement so websites should incorporate this so Google can crawl and index web pages. This section should contain the most recent articles, separated from link baits.
4. Poor quality content – Great caution should be taken when writing news and press releases. Misspelled words, wrong grammar, and improper usage of punctuation are easily detected by Google News and poor quality can affect the ranking of your publication.
5. Blocking Googlebot – The technicality of SEO comes into play with Googlebot. Make sure that Google can easily index your site. These two should not be seen in the Robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
These are five practices that could bring down your rankings in Google News. Stay tuned as we finish this two-part series on what factors can negatively affect Google News rankings.
SOURCE
IMG Source
