Google News Ranking Changes and New Rater Guidelines

[engine]

Google's Richard Gingras, VP, News, has explained a little more about the recent update to the Google Rater Guidelines. [webmasterworld.com]

Part of the new rater guidelines is aimed at finding original news content and giving that a better recognition.

This means readers interested in the latest news can find the story that started it all, and publishers can benefit from having their original reporting more widely seen.

According to Google, these original articles are likely to stay in a visible position for longer.

[blog.google...]

[JS_Harris]

"stay in a visible position for longer".... until the approved sources get around to writing about it? Sounds like "Thank you very much, we'll take it from here". It sounds like we're being encouraged to source stories faster for the mainstream, or at least that will be how Google uses small publishers.

I'm not sure that's a good thing for anyone but the mainstream.

[cnvi]

Content is King... ok Google. I am headed to my managers office right now to let him know I am shifting my marketing budget completely out of Google Ads and putting all of my marketing budget into original copywriting about our mundane products. We heard you loud and clear.

[Selen]

Yes, I notice a lot of mainstream news websites "injected" into the organic search results. The problem is that non-news websites devoted on the topic get pushed down; an article from a "reputable" news source is given more value than it should. It doesn't feel natural.

[Broaster]

A lot of big news websites hog up google news search now for single keywords and many of them are AP articles that are posted on several sites and not original or unique.

I typed in a keyword for a niche in google news and the first 7 positions are all from one website and the articles are not NEW news, some are from a year or two ago what the?

All this stuff started around 2016-17 they started controlling the news more and pushing independent media or small websites out of the spotlight in favor of mainstream.

Most of the big news orgs use robot AI written articles and AP re-posts that get posted on various news sites and still out rank other smaller blogs with original written content.