In December of last year Google made some drastic changes to Google News, specifically to how it selects websites that feature in the news vertical and related areas of Google’s search ecosystem such as the Top Stories carousel and the Discover feed. Previously, news publishers had to apply to be included in Google News and there was a manual verification process. In the current Google News, sites and articles are automatically selected and publishers do not need to apply to be included in Google News. As per the official support documentation: This seismic shift in Google’s approach to news publishers was hidden among the support documentation surrounding the new Publisher Center, which replaced the old partner dashboard that Google News-approved publishers had access to. In this new Publisher Center, publishers can control certain aspects of their sites’ visibility in Google’s news-related elements, such as their branding and topical focus areas. Additionally, getting through the new Publisher Center’s approval process means a site can be included in the Newsstand app on Android mobile devices, and opens up additional monetisation opportunities. I’ve gotten a lot of questions from publishers whether they need to go through the verification process in the new Publisher Center to be included in Google News. The answer is no, you don’t need to be verified in the Publisher Center to show up in Google News or other news-focused areas of Google. However, I do recommend going through the process to ensure your site is properly categorised and branded in Google’s news ecosystem. Since that initial launch of the new publisher center and the abandonment of the manual approval process for Google News, their support documentation for publishers has steadily expanded to provide more details on the new approach to news content in Google. In addition to clearer guidance on how sites can now be considered for Google News, the official webmaster blog has also published information about best practices for publishers regarding news coverage of current events. In this new guide, Google is of course emphasising their AMP standard (my thoughts on which can be read here, nonetheless I do recommend publishers implement AMP lest they cut off their nose to spite their face). Google highlights the importance of adding article structured data to your AMP articles, especially the article’s publication date: “We also recommend that you provide a publication date so that Google can expose this information in Search results, if this information is considered to be useful to the user.” When you’re live-streaming a news event, Google wants you to use the BroadcastEvent structured data markup and submit your relevant content through their Indexing API. “If you are live-streaming a video during an event, you can be eligible for a LIVE badge by marking your video with BroadcastEvent. We strongly recommend that you use the Indexing API to ensure that your live-streaming video content gets crawled and indexed in a timely way. The Indexing API allows any site owner to directly notify Google when certain types of pages are added or removed.” This public acknowledgement of the indexing API leads me to believe Google will be putting more focus on that technology. I wouldn’t be surprised if later in 2020 Google will allow news publishers (and perhaps all publishers) to start tapping in to the API to get their content quickly in to Google’s index. While potentially subject to abuse, a public indexing API makes perfect sense for a search engine that operates at the scale Google does; it basically moves the effort of discovering new content from Google’s crawlers to publishers’ technology stacks. So, essentially, it’ll save Google money. Lastly, in this webmaster blog post Google advises publishers to ensure their AMP articles are also updated in Google’s AMP cache whenever changes are made to the articles. This is obviously something Google struggles with, as once an article is cached in the AMP cache it’s not always updated when the publisher’s version changes. Hence Google needs publishers to tell it when an AMP article has changed. This latest webmaster blog from Google is quite technical and focused on a narrow niche (news publishers). It shows Google wants publishers to become more technically adept at maximising their content for News visibility. It’s an area of news SEO that I also focus heavily on and hope to share more of my insights and experience with in the coming months at relevant events and through this blog. I feel Google is close to perfecting its topical evaluations of news publishers when it comes to which sites to trust and for which topics. Yet the technical realities of news SEO are still somewhat lagging behind Google’s envisaged ideal scenario. Publishers will need to ensure their websites are constantly improved and stay abreast of the demands Google places on their technologies. No matter how good your news content is, it’ll only be surfaced in Google search if the search engine can properly process it. This is not something you just want to take for granted. Google’s technology keeps changing and progressing, which means your news site needs to do the same.

I often come across websites that feature abundant images. I don’t mean the images used in a website’s design, but the images that are a part of a website’s content. Sometimes it seems the whole content of a site is captured in images. This may work fine for sites that feature art or photography, but for most websites this doesn’t work. An image may be worth a thousand words, but on the Internet words still rule as the foundation of good content. You can use images to support your written content, but you can’t use them to replace it. Images are of course necessary. You can write several pages worth of descriptions of your product, but a single image will usually do much more to show your customers what you’re offering. But that image of your product shouldn’t replace your sales copy. It’s there to augment it, to supplement your written description. You still need words to describe your product’s and company’s advantages over your competitors. Here are some best practices for using images on your website: Images don’t replace written content, they supplement and augment your copy. Don’t make your images too big. If the pictures you use on your site are too large they will drown your text and draw too much attention. Don’t make your images too small either. If a picture is too small it’ll be overlooked and you’ll lose the image’s impact. Let your text wrap around your images so that your images become an integrated part of your content. This ensures your visitors will absorb both the written content and the images. Don’t put written content in your images. Search engines don’t see images on your site, so any words you put in an image will be overlooked. Exceptions to this rule are images that perform an action when a user clicks on them, like a download- or submit-button. Use alt tags to give images descriptive text. These alt tags are what search engines see instead of the images. You can put relevant keywords in an image’s alt tag and thus help your site rank better in search engines. Use title tags to give your images appropriate tooltips. In an image’s title tag you can put additional written content that will show up as a tooltip when a user hovers over your image with their mouse pointer. Sometimes this can help you clarify or strengthen an image’s purpose. Proper use of images on your website will enhance your site’s content and will ensure your users will have a positive experience on your site.

Since late 2017 Andrew Cock-Starkey, better known as Optimisey, has been organising regular meetups in his native Cambridge where he gets SEOs from all over the world to come and give a talk. While the meetups aren’t huge, usually having a few dozen attendees, Andrew records the talks and puts them online for anyone to watch for free. It’s a great way to share knowledge around the SEO industry, so when Andrew asked if I wanted to come over and do a talk I couldn’t say no. Sharing my experience and expertise with the industry is important to me, as that’s how I learned much about SEO myself. Hence, earlier this year I made the trip to Cambridge and did a talk about my approach to technical SEO site audits. The video of that talk is free to watch, and I hope people find it useful and worthwhile: There’s also a full transcript available on the Optimisey website if you prefer to read text rather than watch a video. Make sure you check out some of the other Optimisey meetup videos, which includes awesome talks from people like JP Sherman, Marie Haynes, Jennifer Hoffman, Chris Green, Stacey MacNaught, Kevin Indig, and many others.

Anyone remember the ‘Boris bus’? The pledge plastered across a red London bus to give £350 million to the NHS after the UK leaves the European Union? Here’s a reminder. For a long time, when you searched for ‘boris bus’ in Google you’d see many references to this Brexit campaign promise. So many references, in fact, that it became a bit of an embarassment for Boris Johnson, as so far it has seemed to be a rather empty promise. Hence why, in a June 2019 interview, Boris Johnson’s admission that he likes to ‘paint buses’ as a hobby raised some suspicion – primarily because it seemed to be a carefully crafted proclamation designed to game Google’s news algorithms. First highlighted by the folks at Parallax in Leeds, this tactic did seem to have the intended effect initially when the ‘boris bus’ search result changed to show the interview’s statement rather than the big red Brexit campaign bus. Then there was a bit of a backlash as some people caught on to the perceived deception, and news outlets like the Daily Mail wrote about it and these stories started to dominate Google’s results. Ironically, doing the same search today yields results about the bus’s manufacturer going in to administration. So that initial attempt to game Google’s search results seems to have misfired a bit. Yet, this doesn’t seem to have discouraged the people behind Johnson’s PR spin machine. This week, it seems, the PR folks responsible for scripting Johnson’s public statements are giving it another attempt. Take these two search results for ‘boris model’, screenshotted a few hours apart by TheAndyMaturin: Once again this seems carefully crafted to shift public attention away from an embarassing story for Boris Johnson, using language designed to make it in to article headlines that then replace existing headlines covering a different story altogether. Keywords in Headlines This is not particularly difficult to do in Google, especially in Google News which supplies content to the Top Stories boxes you see in regular Google search results. The news-specific part of Google’s algorithms is focused on speed, i.e. surfacing recent articles, and therefore loses some of its accuracy in terms of topical targeting in favour of simple keyword matching. By having a relevant keyword in an article headline on an official Google News-approved publisher’s website, Google is likely to show that article in its news boxes – especially when the only alternatives are articles older than 48 hours, which is the primary window of opportunity for articles to show up in Google News. Google Steers The Public Debate It seems Johnson’s PR people have a keen sense of Google’s importance in steering the public debate, as it is among the primary sources of news for the general populace. Moreover, these PR people know how to play the game to their advantage, and have journalists at the UK’s major outlets dancing like puppets by serving up the right words to put in to their headlines. Wherever you stand on the morality of this tactic, it is effective. While those of us working in digital industries tend to be able to spot these efforts rather easily, most of the public won’t notice these shenanigans and will simply consume the headlines they’re shown. Basically, it’s an effective means of burying embarassing stories in favour of more innocuous articles. Smart use of language gets certain key terms in to headlines for Google to then show in their search results. You could possibly write off the first ‘boris bus’ attempt as a coincidence, but this latest instance seems to show a pattern of deliberate manipulation. Especially considering searches for the actual person involved in the scandal are diminishing, leaving an opportunity to claim Google search real-estate for less focused searches. All is fair in love and war, and UK politics is certainly in a state of war right now. Update: Folks have pointed out to me that this may in fact be the third such instance, as this one is somewhat suspicious too.

As you’ll probably know Google has been ramping up its fight against webspam recently, especially focusing on bad links. As a result, many sites that have received ‘bad link’ notifications in Webmaster Tools and/or have been hit with the sledgehammer of a Google penalty are scrambling to get those spammy links removed. In some cases this might mean a company has to embrace a rather extreme approach to getting links removed. On the PSKL site one such example is chronicled, when the site got asked to remove all links to the LifeShield site. Apparently the LifeShield.com site was hit by a Google penalty for bad links, and it hired a company to send DMCA takedown notices to linking websites that they felt were ‘bad links’. However PSKL is not a spam site (even though you can understand someone jumping to that erroneous conclusion based on their .us domain name), so the DMCA notice was rather ill-received: As you would assume, I was furious. I forwarded the email to a sales manager at LifeShield and then called them and left a message. I got a call back later that night from the sales manager. She apologized and said I didn’t have to remove the links. I said I was pretty annoyed at being threatened with a BS takedown notice and a simple apology wasn’t going to cut it. I wanted to know that this isn’t how they do business. It does beg the question though: can ‘bad links’ – and the negative effects they have – be considered trademark infringements and are thus punishable under DMCA legislation? Also, in the email exchange with PSKL, LifeShield seems to say that their site has been hit by negative SEO: …we had a site cloak lifeshield and generate over 700K back links to our site without our knowledge. Google stepped in and slapped us with a search ranking penalty to which our business has suffered major losses. This might of course be just a case of arse-covering deniability, but if it’s true it does seem to confirm that negative SEO can work.

In the first six months of this year I’ve been lucky enough to speak at a variety of conferences and events. It started off in January with a talk at the monthly Monaghan Ecommerce Meetup, where I spoke about the future of SEO: Fast-forward a few months to the start of conference season, and at Bizcamp Belfast I explained what Google+ is actually good for: Then in May I was part of the Ulster Business Festival where I showed real life case studies about how good web design and SEO can help companies make more money online: Onwards to June where I gave two talks at SAScon in Manchester. My talk about how personalised search isn’t all it’s cracked up to be seemed to be received rather well: Finally at the end of June I spoke at the Dot Conf one-day conference in Dublin, where I ranted about where this internet thing is headed: It’s been a busy first six months of the year, but I enjoyed it all immensely and have met a great many wonderful people at these events. Conference season is drawing to a close so I suspect the next six months will be quieter… but then, who knows?

On Friday the 4th annual DANI Awards took place, celebrating the best in the digital industry in Northern Ireland. For me the awards are one of the highlights of the year, where so many of my friends and colleagues in the local digital industry get together to have a great time. This year it was extra special for me, as I was shortlisted for the final award to be handed out that evening: Digital Industries Person of the Year. It was between myself, Louise McCartan from Search Scientist, and Victoria Hutchinson from Ardmore. As you can deduce from my smug grin on the following photo, I won. Photo credit: Darren Kidd / Press Eye Being awarded such recognition for what I love doing is pretty awesome, but – as with everything in life – it’s never a purely self made achievement. In my 17 years of working in the digital industry, so many people have helped me out and given me such great support, advice, and opportunities, it would be impossible for me to thank them all. Nonetheless, whilst commiting the unforgiveable sin of leaving out so many that should be mentioned, I do want to highlight a few people who’ve been there for me over the years and without who I’d never have come this far. First and foremost I want to thank the team – past and present – at The Tomorrow Lab and the Pierce Partnership who are arguably the best collection of industry experts out there and who I’ve enjoyed working with immensely. Next a big shout out to everyone involved in the Digital Exchange networking group, who’ve had to endure more than a few of my rants, and who welcomed this vocal and slightly obnoxious immigrant warmly in to their midst. The lovely folks from the Ulster University‘s DMC programme, you’re all awesome and it’s my honour and privilege to contribute, however modestly, to the education of the next crop of digital marketing superstars. There’s so many more to mention, but the list would go on forever and I’d still manage to leave out names that deserve thanks, so I’ll just conclude with the most important people in my life: my friends who keep me honest, my family – Mom, Dad, Marlies, Monica, and Jackson – who always got my back, and my wife Alison, who is the reason for everything I do. Ever since I arrived here a bit more than five years ago, Northern Ireland has been incredibly welcoming and kind to me. This wee country punches way above its weight, and I’m immensely proud to call it my home. Northern Ireland has brought out the best in me, and I’m nowhere near done yet. :) Onwards and upwards!