Report details Google News ranking factors

There’s an interesting article on the site Search Engine Watch about a study, presented by Local SEO Guide, Perfect Market and Newsknife, about what factors Google News uses when ranking and sorting stories.

Google News uses a proprietary algorithm to spider, index, rank and categorize news stories from thousands of sources around the world. But, despite Google’s best efforts, the fact that no human editors are involved in the process does cause problems from time to time — so the people who create and edit news websites have a key opportunity to ensure content is as compatible as possible with Google News.

The idea of optimizing content for Google News algorithms should be a very high priority to anyone running a news site since the inclusion in the Google News index can often result in huge traffic increases and often helps bring global context to stories. Also, more and more people are turning to aggregate services like Google News for their news and information, including hyperlocal information, so the more ways you have to connect to them, the better.

Not surprisingly, many of the best practices the study outlines are rooted in classic search engine optimization techniques.

Read the full article here.