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Posted April 2, 2005
BBC News
Guardian Unlimited
BBC News and Guardian
Unlimited, two of the world's greatest non-US based news
sites make frequent appearances at the main news.google.com
site, a site which is probably visited mostly by US news fans.
What do their appearances at this Google News site suggest about
their relevance as a news site for this audience?
The above charts show our news relevance profiles of the sites,
based on our analysis of 1336 news items from the start of 2004
to the end of March 2005. (Newsknife news site relevance profiling
explained, plus
how we rate news
sites.)
From the left, the chart bars show the percentage of the appearances
we found on the home page and each of 10 sub-pages of Google News.
Tables below show the appearance numbers.
2.8% of the BBC News appearances we recorded were on the Google
News home page. Guardian Unlimited had 3.7%. Newsknife's Top News
Site of 2004, The New York Times, had 12% over 2004. In other profiles
FOX News had 7.5% and CBS News 4.3%.
You can see those profiles and much more in Newsknife's Members'
Area. Click at left to join.
There appears to be some way to go to match The New York Times,
but competing with other popular US sites might be possible.
Google News usually links on its home page to just seven news sites
for each major news story. It is a challenge for a news site to
be placed there regularly. But it's worth it for the exposure to
Google's vast audience. Guardian Unlimited has commented
that Google News has brought them millions of referrals.
News Relevance Optimization
One opportunity for BBC News and Guardian Unlimited to improve
the number of their appearances on the home page of Google News
would be to improve the relevance of their news items that currently
appear on the first sub-page of listings.
For BBC News in particular this looks like a significant opportunity.
They appear to have had a cornucopia of appearances as a percentage,
sitting there just below the front page radar.
Newsknife suggests to any news site that the employment of widely
used Search Engine Optimization techniques could improve their position
at Google News.
Newsknife can help.
We can supply a list of the appearances we
recorded; with the ranked position, time of appearance within minutes
and usually the headline.
It may then be possible for a news site to discern vital difference
between their front page and 1st-sub-page news items.
We could monitor
any optimization they may then employ, to see if rankings improve.
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Times appeared at Google News
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Times appeared at Google News
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reserved.
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