Welcome to a new edition of our weekly Everything News SEO Newsletter

“I will track our news keywords regularly” — one of those rare New Year resolutions that’s actually easy to keep.

 

Golden Globes 2020 Rankings

You can easily track near real-time Google Top Stories (News Box) rankings using NewzDash.com at your desired pace.
Screenshot above for Top Stories for the top Golden Globes keywords over the past 12 hours; FoxNews.com leads the rankings followd by NYTimes.com, People.com, Yahoo.com and HollywoodReporter.com. 

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Google News Videos Stats

YouTube is the main source of video displayed in Google News. Based on numbers it is considered one of the top publishers. With NewzDash.com you can track your videos visibility and spy on your compeitiors

Here are the top Publishers in US for Dec 2019

1. Fox News
2. ABC News
3. CNN
4. CBS News
5. IGN

View the Complete Report

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New Top Stories Layout in Google SERPs

A couple of weeks ago Google updated their SERPs to display more Top Stories for trending queries. No they display up to 3 carousels where in the past they used to display 1-2 text links + a carousel. This increased the News URLs displayed in Top Stories from 8 to 24. The additional carousels provide stories for related topics (Tom Hanks, Ricky Gervais relating to the main search query Golden Globes). These topics are mainly entities (people, places, events, etc) selected based on the Machine Learning models. 

Google generates these groups/clusters, using a variety of machine learning techniques including BERT models to examine the related articles and determine where one story ends and another begins. 

In addition to the added use of machine learning, we were also told about these results being more well-rounded and diverse:
New Publisher Center with Helpful Features
Google has merged Google News Producer and Google News Publisher Center and created "Publisher Center" to help improve user experience and functionality. The new features allow you to update light and dark theme logos and manage your publication's identity.

Some SEOs noticed that their publications disappeared from the new Publisher Center. We have found that whoever claims the account first has to add all other users to be able to view the publications.

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Google Top Stories Are Chosen By Importance Scores

So how do “top stories” become “top stories?” The news digest system, during a time, may rank each of the news stories from the snapshots of times/regions/languages. For instance, the news digest system determines a score for each of the news stories that represent the news story’s importance. The news digest system may use an importance score of each of the news stories to determine the score.

The Importance Score is based on

• A number of articles written about a news story
• A cumulative number of clicks on articles about a news story
• A cumulative number of social actions (shares, likes, etc.)
• A cumulative number of queries received from user devices for which articles for a news story are responsive, are selected, or both
• A rate of change of a metric for a news story (when the metric may be clicks, queries, social actions)
• A time, recency or freshness of publication related to a news story
• An expertise of a publisher in a certain news topic or geographic area (when the publisher published an article related to the news story)
• A historical click rate on articles from the publisher
• Citations made to the article and/or publisher
• Relevance of article to the news story
• Another appropriate metric
• A combination of two or more of these to determine the score for the news story

Source: http://www.seobythesea.com/2020/01/google-top-stories-are-chosen-by-importance-scores/

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Google News tests dark theme for articles and upvote/downvote buttons in the feed

articles crawled from different publications and blogs across the Internet. You can also subscribe to specific publishers or read more about a specific topic with a simple tap of a button. To put it simply, it’s a hub for all the news the average user may care about. The app is slowly being improved with new features; most recently, for example, the app gained the ability to let you view news articles in two languages. Soon, the app may add two new features to improve the reading experience: dark theme for articles and voting buttons to manually curate your feed. via xda-developers
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Other Industry News

 

• Google is killing digital magazines print PDFs in Google News - Source
• Google News tests dark theme for articles and upvote/downvote buttons in the feed - Source
• 'Don't be evil': Has Google forgotten its original motto? - Source
• Google News Publisher Center Request Inclusion Feature Broken? - Source