These factors deal with how a publisher’s brand and its website affect its ability to get articles ranked well in Google News.
Publisher Authority Factors
1=strongest factor; 8=weakest
OpEd Commentary:
“There’s exceptions, but the rich tend to get richer in Google News. Even factoring in a news optimization effort, it can be difficult to punch outside your weight class.” – Matthew Brown
“Public PageRank? notsomuch. However Reputation Trust and Google’s internal PageRank are highly important for the source domain.” – Marshall Simmonds
“Trust and authority matter over time but not during the first melee of getting to the story first.” – AJ Kohn
“Human opinion is synonymous with strong or weak brand identity and trust. Search engine technology attempts to quantify and integrate opinion as a highly influential ranking factor which on a good day displays relevant results from even the smallest of news sources and on a bad day looks forced for the sake of variety and *often* completely misses crediting the organization who broke a story.” – Marshall Simmonds
“Category Authority definitely helps readers view credibility of the source and the content they carry. As part of the “worldwide leader in sports” serving fans and how they view brand authority is part of the main mission for ESPN.” – Eleanor Hong
“If PageRank is being defined as external toolbar, then this can be a misleading factor to be sure. But I’m putting it as slightly important anyway, because toolbar pagerank can indeed be a factor for how quickly a site is crawled, deeply indexed, featured in SERPs, and therefore has impact on temporal newsworthy URLs. And goes without saying, but obvious true internal pagerank is absolutely essential and while Google strives to move away from that model by adding elements from social media, personalization, and user behavior, it is still paramount to Google’s approach to search.” - Adam Audette
“Local relevance is probably the biggest mover on this list in the last few years. They’ve clearly been putting more emphasis on this as a ranking factor in 2011.” – Matthew Brown
“You would hope that local news sources would have more indepth coverage. But that doesn’t necessarily equate with stories ranking well. Same with national news sites covering local news. Sometimes national stories might rank higher than local (or vice versa) depending on search factors.” – Eleanor Hong
“Google loves to leverage data and a URL or domain’s “impressions” in search results (and over course clicks, among other data points) is of importance and factored. Again, known, credible, reputable sources have advantages and normally enjoy high visibility and traffic.” – Adam Audette
“I’ve seen too many sites with strong offline footprints and woeful Google News numbers, especially in the TV category.” – Matthew Brown
“Secondary effects of offline circulation are probably more directly influential — higher circulation means more sharing, which in turn bumps up rankings.” – Chris Mull
“Birdcage lining doesn’t make a difference” – AJ Kohn
“If it’s wrapping dead fish, the only thing rank is the smell” – Andrew Shotland
“You would hope that local news sources would have more in-depth coverage. But that doesn’t necessarily equate with stories ranking well. Same with national news sites covering local news. Sometimes national stories might rank higher than local (or vice versa) depending on search factors.” – Eleanor Hong
“Local relevance is probably the biggest mover on this list in the last few years. They’ve clearly been putting more emphasis on this as a ranking factor in 2011.” - Matthew Brown
“Not sure awards count for anything, either in Google News or any other endeavor. They are a waste of time and the industry should be ashamed for spending so much effort on them.” – James Hood