What Ranking Factors Impact Google News Visibility?

[Michael_Nace]

I'm just at the beginning of a new analysis involving Google News visibility and ranking factors, and thought I could put the project out to you, dear SEO geniuses, to get your ideas and perspectives.

Backgrounder:

• My company operates over 50 niche, disease-specific daily news sites, covering science, research and advocacy news about specific diseases.
• Virtually all of them are in Google News.
• They range in age from 3 years old to 3 months old. Varying degrees of page rank / authority
• Content on the site is completely niche to specific diseases, and we have a lot of sites for rare and orphan diseases.
• Most of the content is news, but we also have info/resources pages, blogs, and some short-form posts made for use in social media.

The Project:

• I want to do an analysis of keywords in our news headlines and see how certain keywords correlate with articles that do well -- both in terms of search traffic and overall with users.
• Going to use our Multiple Sclerosis News Today website.
• Most of our search traffic comes from Google News.

What I hope to gain:

• I'm curious to see if certain sets of keywords that relate to the disease, to therapies, etc. drive the most traffic.
• I want to compare these keyword lists to how well we rank in organic search for the same keywords (via news articles or info pages) to see if there is a connection.
• I want to also create a working keyword list of the best-performing keywords in the news as a way of cross-pollinating content production on our blogs, info pages, social content, etc.
• I want to increase my knowledge base of ranking factors specific for Google News.

The last point is really something I wish I knew more about. I feel like there aren't many knowledge resources out there about Google News. Is it safe to assume that the same on-site and off-site SEO best practices that govern organic search engine visibility are at play in Google News, or are there independent factors as well? I'd love to get your thoughts. Thanks!

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Your question is not really a question, rather your thoughts maybe?

Anyway, Google News rankings are based on, yes, typical SEO signals, but, more than anything, time sensitivity, mentions and social signals. So, an article, released today, which got traction in social media (shares, retweets etc), and some links will be performing at the top. So, base your optimization on that - the more newsworthy and shareable your content is - the better results you gonna get.

Hope this makes sense