These factors relate to the use of links and other non-keyword elements on various parts of an article page on a publisher’s website:
Article Page Non-Keyword Factors
1=strongest factor; 21=weakest
OpEd Commentary:
“Your gigantic uncompressed panoramic image is akin to plugging a three pronged plug into a two prong outlet.” - AJ Kohn
“Bigger is better for getting the image breakout in a News snippet.” – Matthew Brown
“While Google News rejects stories with headlines exceeds 21 words, it is a good practice to keep it down to 10 words. This gives more weight to your targeted keywords in your headline.” – John Shehata
“It’s important to link internally as well as externally, to high-quality, relevant and related URLs. But I am also a big fan of keeping it lean. Less links means more equity for each one.” – Adam Audette
“Having a lot of internal links per page is a side effect of having a prolific site” – Chris Mull
“There’s a threshold here, and too many internal links can have a slight negative effect on rankings.” - Matthew Brown
“JPG seems to carry the day here. Unsure if it’s simply because it’s the standard anyway or if there’s a bias, but I’d default to JPG to be safe.” – AJ Kohn
“One of the important ranking factors. Images need to be unique, JPEG formats, near story headlines, well written captions, etc. Check Google guidelines @ http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=13369. Optimized images affects not only rankings but increases CTR (click through rate) which affects how long an article remains in Google News clusters.” – John Shehata
“Length of article is a huge factor in the secondary labels for articles such as “in depth”" – Chris Mull
“Article Too Long and Article Too Short are 2 of the errors many publishers get. While there is no magic number we recommend 200-800 words per article. There are many exceptions based on the domain authority and other factors.” – John Shehata
“Thin articles without much “meat” don’t perform” – Adam Audette
“Fast is good. But, no penalty for average times only an advantage for sites that are fast AND are also doing a lot of other things right. We’ve found 4 seconds is a good average page load time for sites, anything faster may be a competitive advantage.” – Adam Audette
“Google Newsbot was particularly sensitive to load times, so this factor may take on less importance with the shift to Googlebot as the crawler for News.” – Matthew Brown
“It can be hard for Google to accurately index images from news sites that have images hosted on external solutions.” – Adam Audette
“Separating the body text of the article by ads, tags, etc is neutral unless there is too much separation above the fold, where we’ve observed a slight negative effect.” – Matthew Brown