Written by Daniel Smullen - Google News has been around for two decades. And now more than ever, the internet is many people’s primary news source. Gone are the days of buying a newspaper in your local shop to get the day’s news. Now, we have multiple news sources at our fingertips. With multiple perspectives on current affairs. There hasn’t [...]

Written by Daniel Smullen A publisher’s homepage is one of its most important pages for News SEO. So what happens when the number of internal links to articles from a publisher’s homepage is dramatically reduced? We learned just that at a national news publisher in Ireland that I work on, Independent.ie. In this column, I’ll share our experience redesigning the [...]

Is tagging important for SEO? A lot of SEO professionals will respond with a tentative, “It depends.”Make no mistake – done incorrectly, tagging can actually have counterproductive impacts on your SEO efforts.In this article, we will explore examples of the many ways that tag pages can be beneficial for SEO. We will also explore the technical SEO considerations and automation.We [...]

Since the disruptive algorithm update some in the industry call the “Medic Update,” SEO professionals have seen consecutive broad core algorithm updates from Google.The search engine has indicated that “there is no ‘fix'” required to recover from these types of updates.However, some SEO pros have put forward convincing studies, including this one from Lily Ray, that not demonstrating E-A-T (Expertise, [...]

AMP is all about the user experience and fast loading pages.This is done by limiting CSS to 75KB and JavaScript to 150KB, clearing the critical rendering path, and preloading cached content. (You can learn more about how AMP works here.)Even so, AMP is not for everyone.In fact, its restrictive framework and constantly evolving standards (among other quirks and limitations) have [...]

Can you rank in Google’s Top stories without AMP?The answer should have been no.But in this column, you’ll learn what we found by testing non-AMP versus AMP on Top stories performance and the impact it had on traffic at Independent News and Media, where I lead SEO.We’ll explore Google’s documentation on the topic, see what’s happening in the wild, and [...]