As part of an ongoing strategy to assist with the rapid evolution of the news industry, Google is introducing its Google News Initiative (GNI).

The GNI is the next step in the tech giant’s 15-year investment in the news industry.  For instance, last year they spent US $12.6 billion to drive 10 billion clicks to publisher’s websites for free. They have also worked closely with the industry to identify and help overcome key challenges, which led to the introduction of open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages, YouTube Player for Publishers, Google News Lab and much more.

But while these initiatives have aided publishers in Europe and the US, little has been done to assist the Australian news industry. The GNI is something that will address the issues facing Aussie journalists today, including the dramatic shifts in how journalism is created, consumed, and paid for. The program will be focussing on three core objectives:

• Elevate and strengthen quality journalism
• Evolve business models to drive sustainable growth
• Empower news organisations through technological innovation

Elevate and Strengthen Quality Journalism

Fake news. It’s something that has been rampant across the internet for years, but Google is now working with publishers to elevate the accuracy and quality of content to stem the flow of misinformation and disinformation.

“On our own platforms, we’re focused on combating misinformation during breaking news situations. Bad actors often target breaking news on Google platforms, increasing the likelihood that people are exposed to inaccurate content. So we’ve trained our systems to recognize these events and adjust our signals toward more authoritative content.”

This is similar to the approach that’s been taken on YouTube, where relevant content from verified news sources is highlighted in the ‘Top News’ shelf. One of the biggest areas of focus for Google in terms of misinformation is to combat fake news during major breaking news moments, like political elections. As such, they launched the Disinfo Lab alongside the First Draft to combat the spread of fake reporting across the net.

Evolve Business Models to Drive Sustainable Growth

Over the last decade, Google has worked in collaboration with publishers to help grow their ad revenue. However, recent insights have shown that consumers are willing to pay for digital news content, which gives publishers the potential to expand well beyond ad revenue. Google outlined a vision to diversify revenue streams for publishers late last year, but now they’re launching Subscribe with Google, which is an easy way for users to subscribe to various news outlets.

“Our goal with Subscribe with Google is to ease the subscription process to get more readers consuming publishers’ journalism, as quickly as possible.”

In October last year, Google announced their dedication to finding ways to grow publisher subscriptions using Google data, machine learning (ML) and DoubleClick infrastructure. Now, they’re in the early stages of testing a clearly defined ‘propensity to subscribe’ signal based on the ML models they’ve been working with. A trial program that was run through the St Louis Post-Dispatch in the states resulted in a 150 per cent increase in page views to their subscribe page, and triple the number of subscriptions on a month-over-month basis.

Empower News Organisations Through Technological Innovations

Google’s top priority for news organisations is to deploy technology that can improve newsroom efficiency, enrich storytelling experiences and protect journalists against cyber attacks from across the globe.

Presently, they’re doing things like using natural language processing API to help sort, label and categorise more than 3,000 articles a day for newspapers. They’ve also made it possible for the South China Morning Post to use Google Earth Studio to create immersive VR experiences.

But, they still want to do more. As such, they’ve launched Outline, which is an open-source tool from Jigsaw that allows news organisations to provide journalists from Australia and across the world with more access to online resources. For instance, this particular program makes it easy for news outlets to easily set up their own VPNs on a private server.

Google has also announced that they will be committing a whopping $300 million towards achieving these goals, while also deepening their commitment to building products and finding solutions for the news industries specific problems.

The post The Future of Digital Journalism appeared first on SEMA.

There are several temptations that will coerce website owners and managers to get quick results with their link building efforts. Little do they know that they are indeed investing in a ticking time bomb and Google’s webspam team are the ones holding the trigger. Only when they receive a manual or algorithmic penalty do they realise the damage. But by then, it is too late.

So given all of the changes and the updates that have occurred in the link building space, how should webmasters and website managers approach their link acquisition efforts in order to get SEO results that matter. Below are also a few approaches that should be considered in 2018.

Stop Thinking in Terms of Building Links in High Quantity 

Although this has been mentioned several times over the last decade, there are still SEO experts that focus on building links in a high quantity. It’s easy to compare the link volume that competitors have and feel that the only way to compete with them is if your link volume is at the same level as theirs.

This isn’t always the case. Highly relevant and authoritative links that also build traffic can positively impact the website’s SEO performance.

Focus on Relevancy

This is critical to your site’s SEO success. A guide from The Hoth outlines a couple of ways this can be achieved. The first is gaining links from websites whose content is specific to your niche. For example, if you operate a dog washing website, generating links from dog grooming and pet care websites will impact the SEO performance of the site more than getting a link from the Huffington Post.

The second approach is to build relevant content at the page level on an authoritative website. If you look at the dog washing example, a page from a local city magazine could feature a story dedicated to dog washing and grooming. Despite the general nature of the website’s content, there should be benefits to receiving a link from this type of page-level content relevancy.

Don’t Just Build for Authority, Build a Portfolio

Another area where people tend to miss the mark when it comes to link building is that they focus solely on building links to improve the authority of the site. This is common with SEO specialists who focus on improving the domain authority of the website.

It’s important to look at the portfolio of links that are built. Are they from various sources such as forums, directories, blog comments, Question and answer sites, and even blog posts?

Combine Your Link Building Efforts with Good Technical and Content Optimisation

The success of your link building efforts is determined by the perceived value of the content that you are pitching and the technical foundation that will allow the search engine spiders to crawl and index the site’s content and links on a page. Many SEOs bypass these factors in order to focus solely on the link acquisition.

Good content doesn’t have to be a series of articles (although it is a good place to start). It could be a tool, an infographic, images, gifs, memes, videos or anything else. The main thing is the content needs to be valuable to a scalable audience. (Usually a market of 10,000 people or more). Given that the average link acquisition rate is 2%, there is the potential to earn 200 links to a valuable piece of content.

Now that you have these suggestions, it is time to go out there and scale your link acquisition efforts in the right way. Build the foundation and invest in developing a link portfolio that will impact your SEO rankings and organic search traffic over the long-term.

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