That’s the question on the minds of pretty much everyone in the news industry. And that’s the question Tim Ruder, Neil Pharazyn and I were discussing when we came up with the idea for the Google News’ Ranking Factors Survey.

 

The SEO community has been pretty open about sharing information on how Google’s various algorithms work – SEOMoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey and David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey are two great examples. But when it comes to ranking in Google News, there has been surprisingly little discussion out in the open.

So we thought it was high time to ask the SEOs who work on some of the world’s top news sites including NYTimes, CNN, HuffingtonPost, ABC News, ESPN and more to give up the goods. The results of the survey are listed on the left-hand nav of the site.

We have broken the various factors we asked about into different categories (e.g. Publisher Authority) and provided rankings of the top factors in each category along with “OpEd” commentary from the participants. We have also summarized the top 10 most important ranking factors and the top 10 most negative.

Each page has a section for comments so if you think you’ve got something to add, please chime in.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey!

And don’t forget to check out my new blog about Apple Maps!