The New Google Update Might Bring More Traffic to Small Publishers

Here is a piece of good news for publishers and bloggers who run websites where they cover story from a specific industry.

Google is finally trying something to support small and medium publishers, by preferring their original reporting in search engines rather than ranking other prominent publications, who usually pick up the story from small publishers.

There is an ongoing problem with big publishers taking a considerable chunk of search engine traffic from small publishers, who spend hours to find stories that are worth reporting.

First to Break the Story will be Rewarding

In a blog post, Google has made an announcement that it will be changing its ranking factors to support original reporting so that small Publishers would get a piece of search traffic.

According to the blog post, Google has done some changes to their search rater guideline, So that the original reporting websites stay in the search engine for longer, and probably higher than other sites who rewrite them.

Google says that it has got more than 10000 raters around the world, that evaluate the stories that appear in Google. They give constant feedback, which is then filled into the Google search algorithms to make it more efficient.

The guideline is publicly available in a PDF format which you can download here if you are interested to look at it.

To illustrate the update, in section 5.1 of the guidelines, we instruct raters to use the highest rating, “very high quality,” for original news reporting “that provides information that would not otherwise have been known had the article not revealed it. Original, in-depth, and investigative reporting requires a high degree of skill, time, and effort.”

Google indexes all the web pages from different websites, and it has the data to understand which website is among the first ones to break the story. It is very much in their hands to have the small publisher who started it all.

But you don’t always have to be the first to get traffic

The News is not only about who first reported, it is also about investigative journalism, giving in context to the story, and further development in the story as well.

Merely using the algorithms to find the original story, that is worth ranking higher is a little complicated, and this is why they have started with the Search Raters by providing the guidelines, So that they can collect enough data to make it more efficient and automated.

When the changes are coming to the search engine?

Don’t expect the changes to be instant, it might take a while for Google to consider this, and for you to see improvements in your story if you break stories more often.

If you are new to blogging and want to get started I would suggest news nation is not what as profitable as you think if you are going to work alone. There are still many other Niches where you can work alone on a blog and still make it successful.

Checkout the beginners section for more articles related to blogging.