Rob Tornoe | for E&P Magazine
Are you looking at your analytics dashboard and noticing that search traffic to your stories has dropped dramatically? You’re not alone.
In recent months, news organizations have struggled with changes at Google that have led to a dramatic drop in organic search traffic, publishers have had to contend with seemingly massive changes in the way Google distributes traffic, and the integration of artificial intelligence (which remains unintelligent and error-prone) has caused panic attacks across the industry.
Google is clearly targeting publishers and is systematically drying up a source of web traffic that accounts for up to 20 to 30 percent of a news organization’s online readership.
Or maybe there is another explanation.
Barry Adams, a veteran search traffic expert and founder of SEO firm Polemic Digital, has also noticed a decline in search traffic among U.S. publishers. But rather than pointing the finger at Google specifically, Adams believes the blame lies primarily with the publishers themselves.
“I think a lot of them took the traffic from Google a little bit for granted,” said Adams, who has worked with several major news brands over the years, including The New York Times and Fox News.
Adams’ thesis goes something like this: As the Internet became more popular, newspapers dominated Google’s search rankings with their original reporting and brand reputation built over years, supported by the many links pointing to their content, which is known as an authority signal.
“As a news publisher, you could rank for pretty much anything. Any keyword, any search query – if you had a relevant article about it, you would rank for it,” said Adams. “The Daily Telegraph, a proper, formal newspaper in the UK, would be number one on Google for the top 100 songs of all time. That shouldn’t happen. It’s not a music publication.”
That changed in March 2018, an event Adams called the “Newspocalypse.” That’s when Google began rolling out specific topic authority algorithms, first in the UK and then in the US. As Adams explained, newspapers like the Telegraph in England were ranked for politics, world news and business, not music, cars or sports. Tabloids like The Daily Mail ranked highly for celebrity and entertainment news, but saw much of their non-entertainment news disappear from Google.
“Publishers were put into certain boxes by Google that basically said, ‘You have topical authority here, but not there, so if you write about that, you’ll get your ranking. If you step outside of that box and write about something that you’re not really known for and you’re not an established, authoritative publisher for, you just won’t get ranked for that anymore,'” Adams said. “I feel like that’s been a staple of Google algorithm updates ever since.”
Google didn’t really admit the existence of topic authority until May 2023, describing it as a system “for understanding a publication’s level of expertise in certain areas.” More noticeable signals include topic and location, such as The Tennessean’s display for news about high school football in Nashville. Another signal is how often and prominently your coverage is cited by other publications, with Google adding a “Highly Cited” label to the content.
“Google itself had to admit in its antitrust case that it is not really good at understanding content, but it understands signals like links and clicks very well,” said Adams. “Google monitors click behavior. It knows which pages and websites you visit in the Chrome browser, and these signals also play a role in the Google algorithm. But it is above all the citations from major newspapers that carry the most weight in the Google system.”
While these changes have been rolled out over the past five years, they hit many news organizations particularly hard in March when Google began penalizing some publishers for trying to use their remaining topic authority to promote third-party-created content, such as coupons and sports betting. The search giant has manually penalized some who refused to end potentially lucrative contracts.
Adams also said that from his experience working with news brands, the technical side is often overlooked and almost taken for granted – especially with large organizations. This includes issues with indexing and other behind-the-scenes problems that could confuse search engine crawlers. But it also means you need to incorporate SEO into your workflow to ensure each article you publish has the best chance of finding a search audience.
It’s more important than ever for news publishers to focus on the essentials of search engine optimization, especially as publishers based in England and India eye the U.S. as a growth market. Adams said he’s found that these publishers tend to be more rigorous in their approach to search engine optimization, including on a technical level.
“They’re making pretty good inroads into the U.S. media markets and starting to compete with established news brands,” Adams said. “Instead of looking closely at themselves, U.S. publishers are simply blaming Google and saying Google is broken, even though they can probably fix the problem themselves if they just put more effort into optimizing their own website.”
So where should news organizations start? Adams suggests signing up for Google Search Console. It’s free to access for anyone who can prove they’re connected to a news organization’s website. It provides information about how Google crawls and indexes your site, including potential problems. You can also see what keywords your content is showing up for in the console’s Search Performance report.
“Most publishers probably don’t use it enough because they don’t look at it often enough,” Adams said. “It’s just such a wealth of information.”
There are also a number of third-party tools publishers can turn to, such as SEO crawling tools that crawl your content like Google does to see what’s coming up. Adams recommends dedicated tracking tools like NewzDash, which tracks your rankings on Google and tells you when your articles are climbing up the “Top Stories” boxes and Google News verticals, “and, more importantly, when they’re falling out,” so you can either update an article or publish something new to get back to the top of the search results.
The good news is that all news publishers, even startups, can improve and expand their subject matter expertise. But no amount of trickery or keyword-stuffed content will help. Google is trying to find ways to reward original, high-quality reporting, so Adams suggests doing as much quality reporting as possible on topics that align with your news organization’s editorial expertise. Don’t worry too much about search clicks; they will come in time.
Adams likes to sum this up with one term: information gain.
“If you’re just repeating a lot of other stories, you’re not creating articles that are really adding information because you’re not doing anything new,” Adams said. “On the other hand, if you’re regularly contributing something new to the conversation, creating content and reporting on news that others aren’t reporting, you seem to have a much higher chance of not being affected by algorithm updates.”
Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist at Editor and Publisher, where he writes about trends in digital media. He is also a digital editor and writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reach him at [email protected].
