Does my site need to become a news site too?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My site is facing some stiff competition from "news" sites lately, increasingly so since Panda. These aren't big nationwide news outlets but small local flavor news sites that are appearing in serps for my sought after keywords.

What they have in common:
- Location based, the site name contains the county name.
- Compliance with Google's "news" site requirements (multiple writers, unique number in url, etc)
- They republish newswire and press release content almost exclusively...

... and it's that last part that bothers me. A company site will publish some news and a press release or "newswire" type site will republish the news along with a source link to the original site. The story will be picked up by these "news" sites and they will credit the source as the press release site. It's not even the first scraper to get Google love, it's the second scraper and the original company site is often not even on page one in Google. I know this because when I read news I want to verify and write about I have several layers of re-post to travel through.

Google obviously wants "news" sites to rank highly, am I fighting an uphill battle by not becoming one too? The number of "likes" on the company site who released the news is negligible but on the reposting, press release scraping site it's tremendous.

[goodroi]

My simple response would be no you don't need to become a news site.

My more complicated response would be that websites need to evolve and expand their offerings to best exploit the new opportunities that come up. Google's universal serps has opened up many ways to get exposure for your site other than the traditional search rankings.

Even if universal serps was not a big potential traffic generator it makes sense to add functionality to your site. Your current competition and the even tougher competition you will face tomorrow are all trying to outperform your website and grab your users. If your site stays stagnant you will eventually be passed on.

I've added news sections to several sites. This is original content and it has helped to drive new traffic from Google. Much more importantly it has dramatically boosted the direct traffic to these sites as more people bookmark us making us much less reliant on Google traffic. Also this content has generated many mentions in the social world which has lead to more requests from mainstream press contacting us to be quoted in national news stories as the industry expert.

[Shatner]

Those sites are doing well likely because they are big brands, and nothing more.

You can't compete, doesn't matter what you do.