Google News: Stand Out HTML Tag
Last week Google made a change to one of its product which, ironically, doesn’t feature in the headlines much: Google News.
Those of you who use or are syndicated by Google news will already know of the additional traffic and page views the product can deliver, especially if you’re writing about something current on a news site which has a well established authority. But getting your articles performing better in Google news search results may have become easier this past week. Then again, it may have become more difficult too!
The search giants have introduced what they’re calling the ‘standout’ tag, which allows webmasters to highlight noteworthy content which then may or may not be listed as ‘Featured’ news in the search results and on the product’s homepage.
The code for this tag is as follows:
link rel=”standout” href=http://www.mynewsdomain.com/noteworthyarticle.html
Of course, Google have also said that it’s possible, and recommended, that webmasters code up links to other noteworthy news articles using this tag too, which they insinuate will build up trust for both domains in terms of news search rankings.
While there’s deemed to be no limit to the amount of standout tags you can use for outgoing links, Google has stated that webmasters should only use the standout tag for their own articles up to seven times in one week. This goes some way toward answering those critics who argue that this tag will simply be pasted onto every link and would therefore be rendered pointless. That’s because it seems that those sites using this tag more than the stated dose will find it being ignored by Google or at the very least given less precedence.
However, worryingly it seems that the tag can be used on an unlimited amount of outgoing links. This could lead to news networks spamming links from one of their sites to their other sites, using this tag, in an effort to achieve featured status for their articles on the receiving site.
It’s difficult to get a handle on exactly why Google have implemented this change – it’s difficult to see what it will bring to the end user experience which they so vociferously praise. Google news already vet quite stringently which sites are indexed within their results, so I fail to see what this tag will achieve. Normally respected sites will continue to receive good positions in news search results with this tag, whilst poorer sites will struggle – nothing changes.
Perhaps, and this may be the cynic in me speaking, but maybe Google are paving the way for a paid featured status, much like the adwords aspect of organic search which many of us have come to love or loathe.
