Media News - Friday, September 21, 2012

Google News introduces hidden keyword metatag

Google has announced a new metatag called "news_keywords" to allow digital journalists to add up to 10 keywords or phrases, the words a reader may put in to the Google search engine to find an article on that subject. The Google News blog states that this is an additional way that Google crawlers catagorise an article for the Google search engine and Google News. The keywords will be hidden and are all given equal value so sub-editors, SEO editors and journalists do not need to think about the order in which they place the keywords and phrases, which are separated by a comma. The Google News blog states this development gives news outlets more freedom to write creative and pithy headlines, without the need for keywords. Digital journalists have been able to write different HTML title headlines (displayed in the URL), which Google reads, and on page headlines, written for the reader, for some time. The Google blog explains the development: "Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don't need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text." (Journalism.co.uk)

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