SEO for news publishers — Barry Adams // Polemic Digital

Show Notes

• 01:48
  The unique challenge of SEO for news publishers

  Unlike classic SEO, in SEO for news, you get one shot for an article to get traction in Google's news-specific ecosystem. As a news publisher, your article needs to be thoroughly optimized for SEO before publishing to maximize its chances of appearing in Google's news ecosystem.
• 06:25
  Recommendations for SEO success in news publishing

  News publishers must integrate real-time SEO practices into their processes for articles to rank in Google News. In addition, they also need to establish long-term topical authority and trust that Google is also looking for within the news-specific ecosystem.
• 09:45
  The impact of site structure on establishing topical authority

  Site structure and internal linking play a significant role in establishing topical authority. Clear and user-friendly navigation, along with appropriate topic labels, are crucial for helping users navigate the website effectively and search engines determine topical authority.
• 13:05
  SEO education for journalists

  Educating content creators and journalists about SEO involves helping them understand that SEO enhances their work rather than detracts from it. It's about making small adjustments, like making headlines more explicit and avoiding wordplay to increase an articles chances of ranking.
• 16:54
  Overcoming journalist objections to SEO

  To address objections to SEO, its crucial to show them the potential of the traffic SEO can drive to their articles once it is integrated. You can do A/B split testing where articles are written without SEO for one week, then optimized with SEO in the next to showcase the difference.
• 19:11
  Technical considerations for SEO in news publishing

  Optimizing for crawling, fast load speeds, rendering, and structured data is crucial. Using proper images with correct aspect ratios and sizes also enhances website visibility on Google News, top stories, and the Discover feed.
• 21:23
  Legacy content management for news publishing websites

  Its recommended to keep old content on your website with proper crawlable and indexable pagination to ensure Google focuses its crawling on your newest articles. Removing old content could undermine your topical authority as it removes your journalistic history.
• 23:43
  Handling canonicalization for paginated content

  For paginated content, it's essential to use self-referential canonical tags, where each page's canonical points to itself (e.g., page 2 points to page 2). Do not canonicalize paginated pages to the main page, as they contain different content and should not be treated as duplicates