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.

The survey tackles issues such as on-page factors (keyword usage in headlines, keyword usage in page titles, etc.), off-page factors like inbound links from other websites and social media exposure, time-based factors, publisher authority and much more. It’s quite comprehensive and anyone publishing news and looking for traffic from Google News should find plenty to think about in the survey results.

Here’s a peek at what the 17 contributors say are the top overall Google News ranking factors:

The survey contributors have worked on some of the web’s largest and most well-known news sites, including the New York Times, ABC News, ESPN, CNN, Huffington Post and others.

The organizers say that their plan is to do the survey again next year, hopefully with a larger group of survey takers.

Some of these are part of the ongoing purge of Google Labs products, while others that are being shut down were not part of Labs. And Google has also announced that other Google Labs projects have “graduated” out of labs and survived the chopping block.

Confused? Here’s a recap of what’s coming and what’s going.

Google Fast Flip

Fast Flip launched in 2009 and offered a more visual, print-like way to view news on the web. The story goes that Google’s Larry Page wondered out loud why the web isn’t like a magazine — he wanted a way to browse it. Thus, Fast Flip was born.

In a letter to participating publishers, Google says Fast Flip will be removed from Google News and Labs “in the next few days.” Publishers will be contacted within the next month with confirmation of their final advertising revenue payment.

Google Sidewiki

Another 2009 launch, Sidewiki let web surfers comment on pages that they’d visited. It required users to install the Google Toolbar and turn on “enhanced” features. Comments would pop-out from the side in a separate panel.

Sidewiki is shutting down, and Google says users will “have a number of months” to download their comments/content.

Aardvark

Google acquired Aardvark in early 2010. It’s a social search service that was created, ironically, by former Google employees. Users could ask Aardvark a question, and the service would search for the right person in your network to provide the answer. It was named one of TIME’s best websites of 2009.

According to a post today on Aardvark’s blog, the service will be shutting down at the end of the September. The blog post also includes instructions for Aardvark users who want to retrieve their past data before the shut down.

Subscribed Links

Started all the way back in 2006, Subscribed Links let webmasters create custom links that users could add to Google’s search results. It was adopted pretty quickly by some prominent sites, but never grew into anything more than a niche product. With the growth of Google Sitelinks — which are now showing as many as 12 per site — Subscribed Links seems like overkill to a degree. Google obviously thinks so. Susbcribed Links will shut down on September 15th.

Survivors From Google Labs

Some Google Labs projects have survived the chopping block and Google has now listed them as “graduated” on the Google Labs website:

• Fetch as Googlebot is graduating from Labs to its permanent home in Google Webmaster Tools.
• Flu Trends will remain available at www.google.org/flutrends.
• Google Reader Play will remain available at www.google.com/reader/play.
• Julia Map will be released as an open source project soon and remain available at julia-map.appspot.com.
• Google Swiffy has graduated from Labs and soon move to a new domain.
• Indic Music Search will remain available at www.google.co.in/music.
• Google Moderator will remain available at www.google.com/moderator.
• Google Transliteration will remain available at www.google.com/transliterate.

Other Product Updates

Google’s blog post offers details on the future of a number of other Google products.

• Google Image Labeler, a game in which users helped Google understand images by tagging them with keywords, is shutting down. No date is given.
• Google Desktop is shutting down as of September 14th.
• Google Maps API for Flash is being deprecated, but Google will continue to support Premier customers.
• Google Pack is being shut down today.
• Google Web Security – the sales channel is being discontinued, but existing customers will be supported.
• Google Notebook will be shut down “in the coming months.”

Personal aside: Having now written a handful of articles over the past month about the various projects that Google is shutting down, I can’t help but think how many times those of us inside the search industry thought some of these would “change the game” in some way. Sidewiki and Subscribed Links both saw a lot of hype when they were launched as having a potentially huge impact on SEO. Fast Flip and News Timeline were mentioned as possibly having a big impact on online publishing. But our perception and the reality of public adoption (or lack thereof) is often not the same. That’s worth keeping in mind as Google — and other companies — rolls out new products and experiments in the future.