Google News Enables Publishers to Mark Their and Others' 'Standout' Stories

Google has been working to make News more friendly to publishers lately, after being the target of quite a lot of criticism. It's not clear whether all of these changes actually benefit the users, but it's at it again with a new metatag which enables publishers to label their most important stories as 'standout.'

This may have the story rank better in News, provided publishers don't abuse it. It's another step towards giving publishers more power to influence News listings.

"We introduced a new content tag for the US edition that will help us better feature this 'standout' content and give even more credit where credit is due," Google announced.

"If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results," it said.

Publishers can mark their stories as 'standout' manually by editing the header of the story page and adding "rel='standout' " to the link they want. Of course, this could be automated and integrated into the various CMS that publishers are using.

Google tells publishers to use the tag sparingly, seven times a week at most, for it to be relevant. Any more times than this and marked stories won't get the same boost in the rankings or no boost at all.

What's more, Google is also asking publishers to mark links to other newspapers, blogs and so on as 'standout' for remarkable stories. The idea is to enable Google to know when a story is more relevant and important.

"Standout Content tags work best when news publishers recognize not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications," Google explained.

It remains to be seen whether this will work, publishers are not exactly known to work with each other, especially when it comes to SEO.

Google News has been the target of plenty of criticism from publishers, either those concerned about the ranking or those concerned about showing up in News altogether.

Google is working to appease the critics and this latest move does seem like yet another step in that direction. But it relies on publishers to both mark their stories responsibly and also mark others' stories.