Google announced that its algorithm will now elevate original news reporting in search results.
According to Google, “Recently, we’ve made ranking updates and published changes to our search rater guidelines to help us better recognize original reporting, surface it more prominently in Search and ensure it stays there longer. This means readers interested in the latest news can find the story that started it all, and publishers can benefit from having their original reporting more widely seen.”
Google concedes that there is really no absolute definition of original reporting, nor is there an absolute standard for establishing how original a given article is. It says “It can mean different things to different newsrooms and publishers at different times”, so its efforts will constantly evolve as it works to understand the life cycle of a story.
Google says it has instructed the 10,000 raters evaluating its work globally to tune and validate its algorithms and help its systems understand the authoritativeness of individual pages. It says that their feedback would not change the ranking of the specific results but it will be used to evaluate and improve algorithms in a way that applies to all results.
