Google News changes: Good and bad for local news startups

May 23, 2011

Google News changes: Good and bad for local news startups

This month Google News unveiled some changes that are a mixed bag for local news sites struggling for search visibility…

First the good news: Android and iPhone smartphone users now have the option to see news stories relevant to their current location via the Google News mobile News Near You feature.

When visiting Google News from one of these devices, you are prompted via popup whether you want to see news near you. If you choose yes, then this section will be added to your standard Google News layout on that device. (Note: This feature does not appear to be compatible with the FireFox browser for Android.)

Google assesses the local relevance of news via semantic analysis. According to the Google blog: “We analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.”

This service surfaces local news from a variety of local venues. For instance, right now I’m at the Burbank, CA airport. Under “news near you” I’m seeing stories from mostly from local newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, the Ventura County Star, and the Burbank Leader—but also from Eater LA (a local food blog), LAist (a local multi-contributor blog), and the Hollywood Reporter (news for the entertainment industry).

From the perspective of a local news startup, News Near You is good news. The mobile market is booming, and news/information is one of the most popular activities for mobile users.

So as long as your site gets indexed by Google News (apply here)—and your site’s name, headlines, and content routinely offer enough semantic clues for Google to establish the “where” of your content—chances are good that Google News will serve up your stories to local mobile users.

This is likely to broaden the audiences for local news sites and grow their traffic—which is valuable, because otherwise generally can’t compete well with long-established legacy news brands for search visibility.

The (possible) bad news: Option to drop blogs from Google News. Google News has quietly introduced an option that allows all users (on any device type) to remove blogs and press releases from the stories they see in Google News. Search Engine Land explains how this works.

From the user’s perspective, this is generally good news—Google News users have long complained especially about seeing press releases listed as “news”.

However, often small local news startups get indexed as “blogs” by Google News, regardless of how they present themselves to Google. This could render them invisible to Google News users who choose not to see blogs in Google News.

Google makes its own decisions about which sites to index in Google News, and how to categorize them. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land wrote:

“Back in September 2009, Google started classifying some news sources as blogs. It was never really clear how Google determined this. Looking today, I still see nothing within Google News that explains what it considers to be a blog versus a news source.

“Blog? News source? It [used to have] no impact on how you were listed in Google News. But now, blogs definitely get to be second-class citizens within Google News, with an option to filter them out entirely.”

If your news site has been misclassified as a blog in Google News, you can request that Google change your category via this form. But the decision is entirely up to Google, and it’s not clear what criteria Google considers in this decision.

Further complicating this issue is that many local news sites also feature commentary and blog posts by community members. It’s not clear whether Google News could or would index a site’s news content as “news”, while indexing blog content as “blogs.” It may be that housing your blog content under a “blogs” subdomain (such as blogs.nytimes.com) might help. But so far there are no clear answers from Google on this.

The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.