Google Shares Info On Topical Authority for News -- SEM Daily 5.24.23
notability, influence, originality, and reputation, apparently
This is SEM: your daily SEO inspiration, where I curate/summarize one valuable item related to SEO and send it your way M-F.
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Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Searcheye and is about Google’s recently released "news topic authority” blog post.
Cyrus Shepard had a great/quick summary about it on Twitter:
Here’s the money quote from Google’s post:
How topic authority works
The topic authority system looks at a variety of signals to understand the degree of expertise a publication has in particular areas. A few of the most prominent signals are:
How notable a source is for a topic or location: Our systems understand publications that seem especially relevant to topics or locations. For example, they can tell that people looking for news on Nashville high school football often turn to a publication like The Tennessean for local coverage.
Influence and original reporting: Our system looks at how original reporting (for example the publisher that first broke a story) is cited by other publishers to understand how a publication is influential and authoritative on a topic. In 2022, we added the Highly Cited label to give people an easier way to identify stories that have been frequently cited by other news organizations.
Source reputation: Our system also looks at a source’s history of high-quality reporting, or recommendations from expert sources, such as professional societies. For example, a publication’s history doing original reporting or their journalistic awards are strong evidence of positive reputation for news websites.
Coming up: my take on this whole thing. But first, a word from our sponsor:
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My Take
It’s not a huge leap in logic to think that how Google’s algo handles topical authority related to news, specifically, is some form of how it might handle topical authority for the regular SERPs.
Definitely worth paying attention to, but nothing particularly surprising about this…
I have to say though, whatever snappy thing I could possibly say about this post wouldn’t beat how Clint Butler put it on Twitter:
😂
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Until tomorrow…
Sean Markey
sem@hey.com
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