Forget PageRank, at least if you’re a news publisher looking to do well in Google News. Google’s news service doesn’t rely on the same algorithm used by “regular” Google, of which PageRank is a part of. Instead, Google News taps into its own unique ranking signals, which include user clicks, the estimated authority of a publication in a particular topic, freshness, geography and more.
In this, the third part of a wide-ranging interview I held with Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News, a look into how Google News ranks content. Also be sure to read the first two installments:
- Josh Cohen Of Google News On Paywalls, Partnerships & Working With Publishers
- Google’s News Experiments & The Quest To Solve The “Read State” Issue
You may also find this related overview article I’ve written of interest: How Search Engines, Aggregators & Blogs Use News Content.
How’s Google News Work?
One complaint put out by some news publishers, probably most dramatically by Italian papers that requested a government investigation in August, is that Google doesn’t provide enough transparency about how Google News works. Cohen disagrees, saying there’s plenty out there:
“We launched [Google News] blog and put a lot of information on it. It serves multiple audiences, but a lot if it is specifically geared toward publishers. One post was on the myths of Google News exposed.
Cohen adding that the “myths” post itself developed from common questions that Google answers through its Google News forum for publishers. Google also maintains a help area for publishers, too.
Still, compared to Google web search, ranking in Google News can seem a mystery. As I said to Cohen, if someone asks me why they don’t rank for a term in Google web search, I (or any knowledgeable SEO) can determine if there are some obvious content or link deficiencies, blocking problems or potentially a domain that hasn’t earned much authority yet within Google’s web search ranking system.
But why a story does or does not rank well in Google News, either in response to a keyword search or in browsable headlines? There seems little to diagnose or explain. Google News can feel like a black box.
Cohen responded with more specifics:
In a lot of discussions with publishers, we do talk about the ranking side, the clustering process and what we’re trying to do. There’s the story ranking, where we show the top stores of the day in a given category. What’s the aggregate editorial interest is in a given story? What does everyone have on their front page? That’s going to drive the results. What do editors collectively feel is the top story of the day?
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