Google News Trust Factors
In a bid to clean up the fake news on the internet Google has been working to validate and enhance the trustworthiness of the news it shows in its search results. Google has released a new Knowledge Graph specifically for news publishers, called “News Publishers Knowledge Graph”. Not very inventive naming, but at least it’s clear!
The new Knowledge Graph gives more information about the publisher, including topics they frequently write about, notable awards they have won and information on whether their stories have been independently fact checked. By providing more information about the source of the news Google will hopefully be granting greater transparency and enable readers to identify trustworthy sources of news.
In case that’s not enough, Google has also just released 8 trust indicators for publishers to add to their news stories to help readers feel confident that the information they are providing is reliable. These are:
- Best practice – information about who funds the news outlet, what their mission is and if they are meeting other standards such as equality and diversity
- Author expertise – who is the journalist and what is their experience and expertise?
- Type of work – is it an opinion piece, an analysis or sponsored content?
- Citations and references – where do the facts in the content come from?
- Methods – how did the story get investigated and written?
- Locally sourced – lets people know if the story has a local source or writer
- Diverse voices – have efforts been made to bring a diverse range of perspectives to the publisher’s reporting?
- Actionable feedback – whether the publisher is actively trying to get feedback and interaction from the public.
These details can be added to your articles via schema.org mark-up although the specific mark-up for it has not yet been announced by Google, there is Article and NewsArticle schema which might be applicable.
This has not yet been rolled out but it’s good to be ready as people are becoming increasingly wary of online journalism. This is a great advancement in providing more credibility for news sources and helping to clean up the vast amount of misinformation and “fake news” on the internet.
AMP Penalties
Google is getting so annoyed with people purposefully trying to mislead visitors with their AMP pages that they are going to start penalising sites that implement AMP in a shady way.
The issue is that some websites have been creating AMP pages in order to get into the news carousel at the top of the Google SERPs, which only AMP pages are allowed in, and then making visitors click through to another page on their own domain to view the whole article.
Starting from February 2018 any AMP page that does not have content equal to the canonical non-AMP page will not be able to rank in the top news stories section in Google. Websites that keep doing this shady (albeit, clever tactic) could even get a manual action notice in Google Search Console.
So there you have it, some clever new technology came out, a load of people started misusing it in a lazy attempt to rank better and Google is having to crack down and penalise sites for it. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Google’s Job Search Functionality is Getting New Features
Google’s adding some new features to its Job Search functionality which will make it even easier for job-seekers to compare jobs and company information before applying for a role.
The job search initiative (live in the US) has allowed a greater level of exposure for recruiters in the search giant’s results. You can get a more prominent position in the SERPs for your job either by publishing your jobs on one of Google’s preferred partners, or by adding job posting structured data to your listing.
Searchers looking for “jobs near me” or “waitressing jobs” will trigger the Google for Jobs results and give greater levels of information about the jobs straight into the SERPs. The new features Google has added this month include salary estimations based on Google’s understanding of the job title, employer and location of the role extrapolated from data sources like LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Google’s also added a location filter to help you narrow down your search radius.
This is great news for recruiters, but unfortunately not available in the UK yet. It is likely to be rolled out here soon if they are investing this much in the US trial, so start preparing now!
