Adam Sherk

JULY 23, 2013

The standout tag for Google News has been around for a couple years now but many news publishers are still uncertain about it. The primary way that it manifests within Google News is when an article in a lead story cluster is labeled “Featured.”. Does the standout tag actually work? Yes it does, but only so often.

News 213

News Google Publishing Case Study 213

Adam Sherk

JANUARY 23, 2013

The news of layoffs at StumbleUpon reminded me that in compiling some year-end social media referral data I’d noticed that a number of sites had experienced declines in StumbleUpon traffic. The examined sites can be roughly divided into five main categories: food, home, fashion & beauty, health, entertainment and news & tech.

StumbleUpon 172

StumbleUpon Sites Content Survey 172

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 31, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk The Most Popular News Sites on YouTube by Adam Sherk on August 31, 2010 YouTube is both a major opportunity and an interesting challenge for news sites. So I thought I’d investigate how well news sites are doing at building channel subscribers and video views.

Sites 182

Sites News YouTube Press Release 182

Adam Sherk

APRIL 13, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk 25 Major News Sites Ranked by Page Speed by Adam Sherk on April 13, 2010 Now that site speed is officially a Google ranking factor, site performance and page load time are important for SEO as well as usability. So which news sites fared best?

Sites 161

Sites News Yahoo Journal 161

Adam Sherk

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement? by Adam Sherk on September 17, 2009 Now that the improved Facebook Pages have been around for a while I wanted to check the level of engagement that major news sites are achieving with them.

Sites 238

Sites News Engagement Facebook 238

Adam Sherk

MARCH 16, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Real-time Search Optimization for News Sites by Adam Sherk on March 16, 2010 The major search engines are making real-time search a priority, resulting in good visibility opportunities for news sites especially for breaking news.

Sites 143

Sites News Yahoo Engineering 143

Adam Sherk

OCTOBER 6, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Which News Sites Get the Most Social Media Engagement? by Adam Sherk on October 6, 2010 It is safe to say that most news sites are now experimenting with various forms of user engagement and content promotion through social media. on their site).

Sites 176

Sites News Postrank Engagement 176

Adam Sherk

JANUARY 10, 2012

News organizations (along with businesses of all kinds) have been able to create official Google+ pages for a couple months now so I thought I’d check in and see how their pages are doing. Most are from the US but there are a handful of international sites too. But their fan base is not nearly as active on Google+ as it is on Facebook.

Organization 218

Organization News Engagement Google 218

Adam Sherk

JULY 17, 2012

Which news site has the highest customer satisfaction rating? Its satisfaction score of 84 is six points higher than the #2 news site, ABCNews.com. Its satisfaction score of 84 is six points higher than the #2 news site, ABCNews.com. Not a surprising assessment as HuffPo is not exactly a simple, streamlined site.

Sites 125

Sites News Report Advertising 125

Adam Sherk

FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk News Sites: Tame Your Blog Tags by Adam Sherk on February 19, 2010 Ever notice all the tags that some blogs add to their posts? Adding a few meaningful tags is fine, but news sites in particular have a habit of taking this practice much too far.

Sites 112

Sites News Press Release SEO 112

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 22, 2011

Google’s expanded sitelinks give sites greater exposure for branded searches and the ability to dominate the page one results above the fold. User reactions have been mixed so far (some find them overwhelming or borderline obnoxious) but Google is touting the user benefits and the expanded sitelinks appear to be here to stay.

Google 215

Google URL Sites Issues 215

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 14, 2012

What types of sites get the most links from Pinterest? I spend a lot of time auditing websites which means I am regularly in the Google Webmaster Tools profiles for a variety of sites. Lately I’ve been noticing some impressive Pinterest link counts in the linking domains report under “Links to Your Sites.”

Survey 166

Survey Sites Publishing NoFollow 166

Adam Sherk

OCTOBER 23, 2013

Which news organizations are having the most success with the Google News standout tag? I monitored “Featured” articles in Google News for 90 days to find out. Basically most weekdays I’d check Google News once or twice a day. It looks like entertainment news sites are fairly active with the standout tag.

News 159

News Study Google Journal 159

Adam Sherk

APRIL 19, 2011

But in terms of keyword targeting, how different is eHow from major news sites? To get a rough idea I used SEMRush to look at the sites that have the most keywords in common with eHow. So at a very basic level the more common keywords two sites share, the more similar they are at least in terms of keyword targeting. with eHow.

Sites 125

Sites News Posterous Reputation 125

Adam Sherk

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Google News Optimization Tips by Adam Sherk on September 3, 2009 This week Google put out a video to give publishers more information on how Google News works and how best to optimize for it. This is data driven and not an “arbitrary decision.”

News 158

News Google Tips Press Release 158

Adam Sherk

SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

The Google News news_keywords meta tag is now available to all publishers that are approved for inclusion. It is nice that Google News is trying to accommodate publishers and allow for more witty, print-style headlines. But it is fair to say that Google News has always been a strange beast.

News 162

News Google SEO Publishing 162

Adam Sherk

JUNE 9, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk News Sites Not Making Much Use of Static FBML on Facebook Pages by Adam Sherk on June 9, 2010 Between privacy issues, a sweaty CEO and technical problems with its “Like&# buttons Facebook is having a rough time lately. The short answer? Not so many.

News 181

News Sites Yahoo Facebook 181

Adam Sherk

JUNE 15, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact? But Twitter, Facebook in some cases Digg still represent the majority of social media referrals to many news sites, so they continue to be a priority. 2,461,060 2 @cnnbrk 77.3% 3,139,883 3 @TIME 76.9%

News 165

News Sites Twitter Digg 165

Adam Sherk

JULY 23, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk The Most Buried News Sites on Digg by Adam Sherk on July 23, 2009 It’s no secret that mainstream news sites are experiencing increased exposure on social news sites like Digg. Using di66.net’s 403 14 dailymail.co.uk 387 15 telegraph.co.uk

Digg 119

Digg Sites News Yahoo 119

Adam Sherk

JULY 8, 2011

Earlier this week Search Engine Land reported that Christian Oestlien, the Ads Lead for Google+, had posted a message asking businesses to hold off on using personal accounts to create business pages and that non-user profiles would be shut down. Related posts: Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?

Google 111

Google News Engineering Report 111

Adam Sherk

JANUARY 14, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Help Haiti: News Sites Promote Ways to Donate by Adam Sherk on January 14, 2010 As the devastation and human tragedy caused by the Haiti earthquake grows, people are flocking to the news media for information, and more importantly to learn ways that they can help.

News 129

News Sites Digg Press Release 129

Adam Sherk

JULY 10, 2012

The demographics of Google+ are typically described as predominantly male and young. But that is not always the case; sites that are geared towards women are drawing a Google+ audience that is largely female. For example, take a look at the +1 Audience Report from the Google Webmaster Tools profile of a major fashion site.

Google 119

Google Fashion Sites Report 119

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 7, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites by Adam Sherk on August 7, 2009 This week’s Sysomos study of the 5% most active users on Twitter includes a list of the top 25 users (with more than 50,000 followers) ranked by average tweets per day. tweets per day.

Sites 105

Sites News Strategy Twitter 105

Adam Sherk

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites by Adam Sherk on October 8, 2009 Although search engines keep improving on their ability to deal with duplicate content, this continues to be one of the main SEO issues facing news and content sites.

Sites 105

Sites News Syndication Content 105

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 24, 2010

by Adam Sherk on August 24, 2010 As first covered by Malcolm Coles and later confirmed by Google , for search queries that include a specific domain Google is now showing a larger number of results from that site on page one. But do the expanded results apply to the embedded news and video listings in the SERPs?

News 113

News List Google Embedding 113

Adam Sherk

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Google’s recent algorithm change that favors the most recent content for certain types of queries offers good opportunities for news and content sites. Essentially Google has turned up the dial on its “query deserves freshness” algorithm. It is simply a recent event that illustrates the Google freshness update in action.

Reputation 155

Reputation Google Wikipedia Embedding 155

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 4, 2010

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk News Sites on the New Digg: Who is Active, Who is Gaining Followers? Do they want to follow and interact with specific media sites? They also made 29 comments; that’s a very low number but most of the other sites have not made any.

Digg 134

Digg Sites News Activities 134

Adam Sherk

AUGUST 20, 2009

Google employee “Inbal” later provided a more specific time window, indicating “the rate at which we recrawl may vary, but we try to go back and check for changes in article content within the first 12 hours after we first find it.” I went looking for an updated story in Google News today and was able to find an example.

News 101

News Google Syndication Press Release 101

Adam Sherk

MAY 22, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines? So it appears this tip is intended to make it easier for Google News to understand the correct title for articles, as opposed to being a “must do&# to prevent an issue.

News 100

News Google Syndication Press Release 100

Adam Sherk

DECEMBER 1, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers? by Adam Sherk on December 1, 2009 In November Google announced a new format for Google News Sitemaps with several changes including new tags that provide additional detail on each submitted article.

News 104

News Publishing Google Press Release 104

Adam Sherk

SEPTEMBER 1, 2011

News publishers are all too familiar with the fact that Google News doesn’t always do such a great job of favoring original sources in its story clusters. Today I noticed an example that is worth pointing out because you’d think Google News would be able to handle it properly. Google News Optimization Tips.

News 121

News Google Syndication Aggregator 121

Adam Sherk

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Home About Contact PR Publishing SEO Social Media Subscribe Adam Sherk Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles? So if you link to your Twitter account on your Google profile the people you’re following on Twitter become part of your social circle. If not how do we get there?

Google 109

Google Google Reader Press Release Survey 109

Adam Sherk

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

Believe it or not, being indexed in Google and Google News is actually good for news sites. Google-less? I’d actually like to see this happen…it would make for an interesting case study demonstrating that the only one hurt by such a deal is News Corp itself. – If You de-Index Will They Still Come?

News 101

News Google Hitwise Press Release 101

Adam Sherk

MAY 13, 2009

Initially Google is supporting data on reviews and people. Initially Google is supporting data on reviews and people. Reviews in particular offer a good opportunity for publishers as many content sites produce multiple types of reviews on a regular basis. But now is a good time to begin experimenting with it.

Review 100

Review Google Embedding Press Release 100

Adam Sherk

JUNE 5, 2009

While it’s good news that Google is continuing to improve its ability to deal with JavaScript, this change also impacts the way that many publishers display sponsored links on their sites. Is Google going to run out and start penalizing sites with sponsored links in JavaScript? But Does it Violate Facebook Guidelines?

Publishing 100

Publishing Google NoFollow Guidelines 100

Adam Sherk

APRIL 3, 2013

This topic has been in the news recently with Google first issuing a reminder that any links within sponsored content should not pass PageRank. For example The Huffington Post is allowing brands to sponsor a section on the site which (in some cases) includes only regular HuffPo editorial content, as opposed to brand-created content.

Guidelines 260

Guidelines SEO NoFollow Module 260

Adam Sherk

OCTOBER 7, 2014

Google AdWords: Keyword Planner. Google’s Keyword Planner has become a hassle for new users to set up since it now requires having an AdWords account. Google Trends. Editorial teams like using Google Trends because there is no sign-up or login required. Google Webmaster Tools: Search Queries.

Analysis 241

Analysis Research Trends Tools 241