What’s this about?
In another effort to stem fake news, Google is working with a peak body, and news publishers to generate additional trust symbols to surface in search.
Naturally, this will favour Google’s new best mates the news publishers.
Read more in the extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 17th November 2017.
#SEO #SEONews #GoogleNews #FakeNews #SERP
Google Introduces 8 Trust Indicators to News Stories
Key Issues Summary:
- In its continuing efforts to stem the flood of fake news, Google News is introducing 8 new Trust Indicators for publishers to use.
- This is a joint effort with Google and the Trust Project and 75 news organisations.
- The Trust Indicators include things like: Best Practice, Author Expertise, Type of Work, Citations & References.
- These may eventually make their way into News Knowledge Panels, and inline into Google News listings.
Key Actions To Take:
- Include the Trust Indicators in your content in the form of Schema.org markup, available from the Trust Project.
- This is quite detailed schema, so extensive review may be needed.
- Wait for the inclusions into Google News, and Knowledge Panels.
- Click here to contact me to discuss how ti implement schema.org structured markup into your website.
Insights & Discussion:
On the surface, this is a good thing. It enables users to quickly determine if a news source is likely to the accurate and truthful or not.
Unfortunately, news organisations have long had a history to telling a partisan side of the story, or only telling part of a story which is useful to them, or their agenda. Think of your favoured august journal of repute and the ways stories are covered by similarly august journals with opposing views.
I hope that moves like this do not have a chilling effect on citizen journalism. Many of the biggest news stories have been first investigated and told by bloggers, or people with a bee in their bonnet. I would really hate to see good and valid news stories quashed because a blogger does not have a trust indicator on their stories.
The suppression of accurate information is likely to be a bigger threat than the flood of fake news. And, of course, these symbols will help to keep the big news organisations at the top of the pile when it comes to telling stories.
Don’t get me wrong, fake news is a problem, but potentially suppressing other stories is not a good way to deal with it.
One thing that does interest me (mainly because I’ve just thought of it) is that we haven’t heard a great deal from Facebook on the issue of fake news recently. Odd?
More Information:
The State of SEO Mid-2017 Released
TL;DR
- New trust symbols are on their way.
- They’ll be generated by new schema markup.
- It’s a joint project between the Trust Project, news publishers, and Google.
- It’s not known how smaller news publishers may be affected by this.
- Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
- Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
- Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.
