To me, it pretty much looks like Google is looking for ways to inject Google+ all over Google News. But let’s explore the new changes that are rolling out to the U.S. edition of Google News over the next week.

Notice the larger image on the story plus the Google+ comment from U.S. Department of State Google+ account:

Google News has a new “realtime coverage” button next to stories and when you click on it you are taken to that coverage, accompanied by Google+ discussion on the right hand side:

Related Stories:

• Google News Brings Back Search The Web Option
• Google Removes Author: Search From Google News
• Google News Spotlight Now Spotlights Your Friends & Stories They +1
• Journalists Get Their Profiles Featured In Google News … Their Google+ Profiles, That Is
• Google News Moves Advanced Options To Search Bar; A Sign Of Things To Come?
• Top 10 Negative Google News Ranking Factors
• Google News Launches “Standout” Tag for Featured Content

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that I wasn’t able to read some Wall Street Journal stories when visiting from Google. I figured this was some type of bug. But a recent case got me digging deeper: the Journal’s story about how Google created a workaround past Safari’s default privacy settings as a way of enabling +1 buttons on Google’s ads.

I was unable to read the full story after finding it listed in search results at Google, either in regular Google web search listings or in Google News. Instead, I was shown only a short summary with a prompt to subscribe or log-in. That shouldn’t have been the case, given that the WSJ participates in the First Click Free program, which I’ll explain in more depth below.

WSJ: Not Everything Included In First Click Free

As it turns out, the Journal has been keeping some stories out of First Click Free for over half-a-year.

“Google FCF [First Click Free] is a way to introduce our content to new readers and broaden our audience. As a strategy, we hold back a few of our top stories by not having the full story crawled, which limits select articles from being available via FCF. We have been doing this since last summer as a strategy to encourage subscriptions,” emailed Ashley S. Huston, Vice President, Corporate Communications, for the Wall Street Journal, when I asked about the situation.

What Is First Click Free?

The Wall Street Journal, like many newspapers with registration requirements or paywalls, participates in Google’s First Click Free program. That program allows publications to provide the full-text of articles to Google that are normally kept behind some type of barrier. This means Google can better understand what a story is about, which in turn means it might have more visibility in Google, generating more traffic for the publication.

To be in First Click Free, Google requires that anyone coming to those articles from a Google search be allowed to read the entire article, without having to register or pay. This helps reduce people who get upset with Google for listing content that they can’t easily view.

If the person tries to click from the article they found via search to another article, then a barrier is allowed to go up. They get the first click from Google for free, hence the “First Click Free” name. All subsequent clicks can be blocked unless they’ve registered or paid.

What prevents someone from finding the articles they want, then searching for them and repeatedly using First Click Free to bypass barriers? Google does allow limitations. People must be allowed up to five free clicks per day, the rules say. Then they can be limited.

That five free clicks per day rule, by the way, is why the New York Times limits visitors from search engines to that amount even though oddly, it allows anyone from social media sites to have as many reads as they want. My article from last year, The Leaky New York Times Paywall & How Google Limits Led To Search Engine Limits, explains more about this.

WSJ Goes Hybrid: First Click Free & Subscription Required

First Click Free has typically been an all-or-nothing implementation by newspapers. They’ve either made all their content available through the program (such as the New York Times does) or none of it (such as The Times does). The WSJ is pioneering a hybrid model. Some content is offered through First Click Free. Some isn’t at all.

In the case of the WSJ’s Google-Safari privacy article, unless you paid, you simply were not going to read it. It was an effective strategy. My WSJ subscription had lapsed about two weeks before the article came out. I was waiting for the inevitable renewal offer for around $150 per year for home delivery and web access. But I wanted to read that story so much that day that I renewed at the $260 list price.

Today, by the way, the article is available for free. That’s even more cleverness on the part of the WSJ. Now that it has become dated, along with being widely cited and excerpted, there’s probably more value in making it completely open for anyone to read (and likely link to), as a way of building traffic that earns ad revenue, rather than subscription revenue.

Here’s another example of the selective withholding in action. Consider this WSJ story that’s listed in Google:

If I click on that story from Google to the WSJ, I get a barrier — so it’s being withheld from First Click Free:

Is It Cloaking?

At this point, some search marketers and others technically savvy about how Google works might be wondering if the WSJ is cloaking, a huge no-no with Google.

Cloaking means that you show Google something different than you show human visitors. Google dislikes this. It wants to see exactly what a human visitor to a site would see, lest the site somehow try to trick Google (say showing content that says a page is about one thing, when it’s about something else).

The problem here is that what a human visitor sees will depend on whether they have a WSJ subscription or not. Those who do see the full article. Those who don’t see only a summary.

In cases like this, the fallback to determine if cloaking is happening is usually whether a publication is doing something special for Google that it wouldn’t do for humans. On that basis, the WSJ seems fine.

No, Not Cloaking

For this particular article, the WSJ is doing nothing out-of-the-ordinary for Google than it would do for any other visitor who doesn’t have a subscription. Only a summary article is shown to Google, as the cached version reflects:

Oddly, somehow Google is seeing the full-article for the page snapshot (Google Instant Preview) it makes that leads to the cached copy, when you hover your mouse to the right of the listing:

Overall, the Journal seems to have found an interesting way to have its Google cake and eat it, too. It gets to participate in First Click Free, which allows the full-text of its articles to be recorded by Google (full-text articles are more likely to rank for a wider-range of searches than summaries). That means traffic that helps drive ad revenues.

It also gets to withhold the full-text of some key articles, which still likely get plenty of traffic via Google even though only summary articles are shown. However, by being selective in this way, it helps increase subscriptions.

What’s Subscription-Only Getting Confusing

The only issue the WSJ really faces is that potentially, Google might decide that it’s time to change the rules to disallow this type of selective withholding.

Technically, withholding articles as the WSJ does is making them subscription-only content, which should require Google to insert a “Subscription” notation next to the article. Google does this because, as you can imagine, it’s annoying for searchers who are used to going from Google News to the full-text of articles only to get a registration barrier.

Google isn’t currently tagging any of this withheld content from the WSJ as subscription-content, as it should. That’s probably the case because it doesn’t know how. Typically, as I explained, sites are either entirely subscription-only or First Click Free. Google probably needs to figure out a way to deal with a hybrid situation like this.

Heck, I’ve found Google had a tough-enough time displaying subscription-only labels in the past. But beyond the WSJ, life is getting even more complicated.

Consider that “subscription-only” Newsday actually gives five free visits per month to anyone:

So is it a subscription site or not? Google doesn’t label it that way, even though you can clearly see the content that Google is indexing is the non-subscriber material:

Meanwhile, The Times supposedly gives no free clicks:

Yet clearly, The Times is also letting Google have full-access to some articles:

Since the site advertises itself as subscription-only, should those stories have a “subscription” tag next to them? Or since they are available to anyone, should they not carry this, as is currently the case?

I’ll be following-up with Google more about this. I did talk with the company initially, but it didn’t provide any official comment on the WSJ’s experimenting, other than it was something Google typically had not seen.

Related Articles

• Google & AP Extend Long-Term Content Deal
• 44% Of Google News Readers Only Scan Headlines? Maybe Not!
• Google Modifies “First Click Free” Policy To Accommodate Publishers Gating Their Content
• Josh Cohen Of Google News On Paywalls, Partnerships & Working With Publishers
• Under The Hood: Google News & Ranking Stories
• Top 10 Negative Google News Ranking Factors
• Google News Plays The Badge Achievement Game
• Google News Launches “Standout” Tag for Featured Content
• The Leaky New York Times Paywall & How “Google Limits” Led To “Search Engine Limits”

Panda In The Pipelines

There’s a mention of the Panda algorithm update that we wrote about last week, but it also includes a somewhat cryptic reference to being more integrated into Google’s “pipelines.”

We improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines.

Sounds like Panda is baked into things even more firmly than before, which I guess is bad news for any sites that were affected negatively over the past year.

Fresher Results

Google says it made several “minor updates” to the freshness algorithm update that happened back in November.

Date Detection

On a somewhat similar note, the update also says that Google has improved how it detects the date of a web page (document), and that means searchers should see “fresher, more timely results, particularly for pages discussing recurring events.”

Autocomplete

There are two updates related to autocomplete: Google says it’s now faster at delivering predicted queries, and the spelling corrections are now “more consistent with those used in search.”

Speaking of spelling…

Google says it’s doing a better job with “full-page replacement” — i.e., showing an entire page of results for a correctly spelled word and ignoring the searcher’s misspelled word/query. There’s also a change that Google says will help it give more accurate spelling corrections for rare queries.

News queries

Google says it’s improved how it decides when to blend news results into the search results page. The change makes Google “more responsive to realtime trends.”

That’s a quick overview of about half of the January tweaks on Google’s list. Here’s the full list on Google’s Inside Search blog.

Google redesigned the Google News search box to add the ability to search the general web index.

Here is a screen shot:

As you can see, you can click on the last result in the suggestions, you will be taken to a general web search.

Plus, as short cut, you can hit the enter key to search Google News or Shift+Enter to search the web.

As Barry Schwartz reported this morning on Search Engine Roundtable, using the author: firstname lastname command at Google News brings up no results now, and Google has disabled it on purpose. If you think it has something to do with the rel=author movement, it seems that you’re correct. Here’s what a Google employee named Erik explained in the Google News help forum:

The author: search operator is no longer available. For author-specific Google News content, I would recommend use of the Authorship capabilities in Google News, introduced last month. Integration with Google+ circles means easier following and engagement between authors and readers.

The main problem here, as Barry points out on SER, is that rel=author markup rarely seems to show inside of Google News search results.

If you are logged in while using Google News and your friends or contacts have used the Google +1 button to like the stories in your Spotlight section, that information will show up in the Spotlight section near the article. It will even let you click on the name of your friend/contact to see their social profile on Google.

Google said:

Starting today, the Spotlight section will sometimes include articles that your Gmail contacts and people in your Google+ circles have publicly +1’d. You can see their profile pictures and click through to their Google+ profiles, just like on Social Search. And of course you can +1 the stories too, expressing your opinion and optionally sharing with your circles.

Related Stories:

• Google+ Badge Tool Now Makes Facepile-Style Badges, +1 Counts To Be Consolidated
• Google+ Pages For Businesses: The AdWords Impact
• Google Webmaster Live Help Via Google + Hangouts Tomorrow
• Google’s +1 Button Now Works With Google +, Go Figure!
• How Being “Friends” On Google+ Leads To Better Rankings
• New: Google Now Showing Local +1 Counts
• Confirmed: Google Showing Google +1 Counts To Logged Out Users
• Comparing Facebook Like vs. Google +1

In a blog post today, Google showed an example of how the profiles will be featured within Google News.

The journalist has to first have a Google account that’s linked to their articles, and when that’s the case, Google News will show the journalist’s Google account profile photo along with information about his/her from Google+ — how many followers and an “Add to circles” button. There’s also a link on the journalist’s name but, rather than linking to his/her primary website, the link points to the Google+ profile.

It’s very similar to the changes Google made last week to how it displays rel=author markup in regular Google.com search results, and I suspect it’s going to open up Google to more charges that it’s promoting its own services/properties in search results. (I’d bet that many journalists, not to mention their employers, would rather be featured with a link to their profile/author page on their main website, or perhaps even a link to their Twitter profile, for example. Google would likely argue that, Hey, we’re giving your name and face extra visibility that you didn’t have before; we’ll link wherever we want, thank you very much.)

Google says this change will roll out over the “next several weeks” and will only be available in English-language versions of Google News at first.

Here are before and after screenshots to show what I’m talking about.

Before:

After:

There’s a small triangle on the far right of the search bar and, when your mouse moves over it, that “Advanced news search” indicator appears. When you click on the triangle, a full set of advanced search options appears — no need to click through to a separate page.

As far as I know, the actual advanced search options in that dropdown are no different than what used to be on the separate page (but it’s not like I memorized them, sorry).

Google Docs already has a similar feature, where a small triangle on the right of the search box brings up advanced search options. The upcoming Gmail redesign will also have (advanced) search options that are accessible this same way.

Other properties, like Google Image Search, Google Calendar and Google.com web search continue to have advanced search options on a separate page. But it’s not a stretch to imagine similar functionality rolling out across all Google properties, especially considering their summer announcement of plans to update the overall Google user experience with a “consistent visual experience.”

At least three of our SEL editors are seeing the new advanced search drop down on Google News, so if this is just a test, it seems to be a pretty wide one. And it’s not just us seeing it — thanks goes to Steve Rubel for tipping us to this via Twitter.

1.  Duplicate Content

Just as in traditional Web SEO, duplicate content was determined to be the biggest negative factor. And while plenty of news sites create duplicate content on their own, those surveyed focused on the use of other sources’ content on your site, particularly scraped or plagiarized content.

Google is getting better at determining the original source of the content and degrading the rankings of the sites that “borrow” it. And if you are distributing press releases on your site, make sure you separate your original news content from your press releases by creating two different sections on your site and adding “nofollow” tags to all links to press releases.

2.  Vague, Abstract Headlines

This is a fancy way of saying headlines that don’t target specific high value keywords. I remember when Eliot Spitzer got caught with the hooker and the NY Post ran the headline “Ho No!” Awesome headline. Amazing linkbait.

If you can write a headline like that, then go for it, but everyone else should stick to “Spitzer Caught With Hooker”. If you are writing headlines for a news site, you need to learn how to do keyword research.

3.  No Google News Sitemap

I am always surprised when I find a news site not using these. I have seen dramatic differences in crawling, indexing and rankings as a result of using a Google News Sitemap. It’s not particularly hard to implement. What are you waiting for?

4.  Poor Quality Content

Google News has ways of algorithmically and manually determining if your site tends to misspell words, use poor grammar, and generally produce poor quality content. There’s no excuse for bad writing!

5.  Blocking Googlebot Via Robots.txt

This is one of those classic SEO screw-ups that keeps a SEO consultant’s phone ringing in the middle of the night. If your organic traffic just tanked, one of the first things you should do is check your robots.txt file and make sure you don’t see these two lines:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

6.  Poor Site Performance

If your site is slow and/or produces a lot of 500 errors, your rankings are going to suffer. Google wants to send people to fast-loading pages. There are variety of tools you can use to monitor your site’s performance including the Crawl Stats and Site Performance reports in Google Webmaster Tools and Google’s Page Speed Tool.

My favorite technique is to use a script to track your server logs for when Googlebot gets 4xx or 5xx response codes, then send out an email to the team notifying them of the errors. Whomever is responsible for performance will have a heavy incentive to keep the site error-free and keep those emails to a minimum.

7.  Poor CitationRank

CitationRank is the measure of how well a story on a news site gets linked to from or referenced on other sites, particularly other news sites. These kinds of citations demonstrate that the story is authoritative on the subject. If you can’t get others to link to your story, it’s going to be harder to get it up on top.

8. Low PageRank Domain

If your site’s overall SEO program is not competitive, you will have a harder time ranking. Make sure you are at least getting the basics right. Make sure your site is accessible to search engine robots, targets high value keywords and regularly gets links from other sites.

9.  New Site

Just as new sites can have a harder time ranking in Google’s Web results, sites with low/no trust and/or history in Google News will have a harder time ranking well.

New sites must demonstrate trust by getting linked to from other authoritative sites, by getting well-shared via popular social media channels and by getting well-clicked-on relative to other sites in Google News for a particular story.

“Category Authority” was deemed by our panel to be the most important ranking factor, so new sites will likely have the best luck if they focus on a specific niche to be expert in.

10. All Syndicated Content With The Same Titles As The Source Site

While this is basically the same thing as Duplicate Content, the panel seemed to think this case deserved special mention as more and more news organizations put more reliance on syndicated content, without even bothering to rewrite any of it.

If you don’t put your own spin on the news, you are not going to do well in Google News.

For more information on various Google News Ranking Factors, check out www.googlenewsrankingfactors.com.

The attribute works a similar way as other link rel attributes:

• The tag should be placed in the <head> section of the source code on the page
• The syntax is <link rel=”standout” href=”URL”>

For example:

<link rel="standout" 
href="http://searchengineland.com/my-awesome-article>

When marking your own content as standout, you place this tag on that page and indicate the canonical URL. You can also recognize excellent source content from another publication that was a resource in writing your story. In this latter case, you would point to the URL of the source as the href value. You can point to content on any domain. Unlike the seven-article limit per week on flagging your own content as standout, there’s no limit on the number of times you can cite other content.

In other words, you can point to your own domain up to seven times a week (any more than that and Google News will start to ignore this tag) but can point to other domains as many times as you’d like. Citing other sources is different from using the original-source and syndication-source tags. Those tags tell Google what version of the story should get credit; this tag tells Google which story is the “standout” version.

Google News already recently introduced Editors’ Picks, and it’s unclear how these two feature will work together, although a news organization has to be approved for Editors’ picks, whereas any publisher can use the standout tag.