A WebmasterWorld thread has one Google News publisher thinking that the stories on his site that were syndicated in Google News tend to have a lower organic ranking in Google's web search results.
He said:
We've a section on our website that publishes technology news and is indexed by the Google News service. Now, whenever there's a breaking news, the site usually attracts lot of traffic because Google lists the news articles on first page most of the times.What we've noticed is that these articles are pushed down in organic searches and that hurts the overall traffic (long tail). Even our well researched articles do not get the rankings they deserve (I can definitely tell apples and oranges).
Now, this site is in Google News and I've always felt our stories don't rank in the web search results as high as they should. I've always assumed it had to do with our penalty and not because of how Google may treat news publishers in organic rankings.
To be honest, I find it hard to believe Google wouldn't rank a well researched article in the organic results because it is a news site.
Tedster, WebmasterWorld's administrator, said:
I've always had the feeling this this is so, but I can't 100% confirm it. Of course, when a query needs fresh results because it is breaking news, then a News Results line may also appear as part of Google's Universal Results page.But it seems to me a news page from a news website often doesn't break into the organic Web Search top 10 (or even 30) until the news is getting stale. And depending how long tail the search is, that may mean it never shows up in Web Search.
I use both Google News and Google Web Search on a daily basis, so I do have a pretty big base of experience behind my opinion - although that is not a definitive study of a large data set.
So clearly, he concurs with that assessment. Do you?
Matt Cutts tweeted about this:
@kleinja that sounded utterly bogus to me.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) September 20, 2012
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for organic paper
