(4)
For about a year now, Google has been listing on some Google News story clusters a mention of the "highly cited" story. For example, the story listed above, shows several stories and then notes one of them is "highly cited." But what makes it highly cited?
A WebmasterWorld thread asks why is it "highly" cited, shouldn't it be "mostly" cited?
A Google News help page mentions highly cited as "the article that appears to be most frequently. referenced by other articles in this story."
If you look at the story in the image above, it cites Richard Lai's Google+ profile, he is the Editor-in-chief, Engadget Chinese and the article in the cluster was was written by him but not shared by him on Google+.
So is it Google+ shares or just article citations?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
James Piper
09/25/2012 06:27 pm
Why is the link to WebmasterWorld just going right to this article?...
Barry Schwartz
09/25/2012 06:34 pm
Typo in my HTML, fixed. Sorry about that and thanks for letting me know.
Michael Martinez
09/26/2012 03:00 am
The "in X Google+ circles" annotation appears all over Google's SERPs. I seriously doubt it has anything to do with the "Highly Cited" metric.
James Piper
09/27/2012 06:06 am
Thanks... The Reddit community would be proud of my work done here =)