Google Focus On Keywords & Sitelinks
Google’s Latest Algorithm Update In The News
Online copywriters and journalists have long been required to integrate important keywords into the titles of articles and blogs. This method is used in order to persuade Google of the relevance of certain news items and therefore boost search engine rankings.
The keywords are likely to hold some significance for the foreseeable future.
However, they can now be added to the Google news metatag. This is a new hidden feature that will be incorporated as part of the news page source code.
Google said that the news metatag will be ‘Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, [letting] publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text.’
They also revealed that ‘this metatag will be one signal among many that our algorithms use to determine ranking.’
A representative of the Guardian said, ‘It doesn’t mean news outlets can suddenly start using print headlines on the web again. And as far as we know Google will still consider the headline as as ranking factor.’
Google Set To Enforce Sitelinks Policy
Webmasters may be aware that Google begun specifying the need to have unique sitelinks as part of targeted adwords advertisements some time ago. However, after noticing that a number of links are still pointing to duplicate content, they realised the need for a rigorous enforcement of the adwords policy.
The Google team are apparently willing to allow some time for the adwords users to ensure that all sitelinks are connected to unique landing pages. They issued a statement pointing out that ‘We realize that manually checking and fixing duplicates among your existing sitelinks and landing pages might take some time. So we’re delaying proactive enforcement with existing sitelinks for a few months.’
Anybody who is creating new advertisements or changing those that are already in use will be immediately required to abide by the new rules. This may mean that the webmasters have to create more landing pages for their existing portfolio of websites.
