Develop Original Reporting

Google said in 2019 that original reporting was an “important element” of the coverage it wants to provide.

The search giant said at the time that it had changed both its algorithm and its guidelines for its human search raters to help it better “recognize original reporting, surface it more prominently in Search and ensure it stays there longer.”

To understand more the role these search rates play in SEO, check out our module on E-E-A-T.

This update to their algorithm has massive implications for ranking news articles. If an article is deemed to be an original or comprehensive source for the topic, Google will reward that page with a higher position in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

The update came in response to a mushrooming of tech platforms and news aggregators that gathered news from different sources and republished them, cornering the bulk of the news traffic in the process.

This meant that small news publishers pushing out original news reports struggled to rank well on Google despite being the original source of a news item because they lacked the resources of large news aggregators.

A 2019 study found that more than 80% of all Apple News content came from just 20 large publishers who were republishing original reporting from smaller publishers and cornering the resulting traffic bump.

3.3.2 Does Original Reporting Matter for SEO?