Google tries to promote old fashioned journalism

NEWS AGGREGATOR Google has tried to promote original reporting by creating an HTML tag that highlights original content at Google News.

Google News is one of the widely viewed news aggregators on the web and automates the process of gathering links to news articles. Due to the service not discriminating media outlets, it has led to some media outlets racing to get stories up first in order to appear on Google News. Now, Google has said that it intends to promote good old fashioned journalism by introducing a tag that highlights original content.

Google's new Standout Content tag will, according to the firm, "give even more credit where credit is due" to original stories. The tag, which essentially is an attribute of rel="standout", should not be used more than seven times a week. If publications abuse it, Google said there is a chance that Google News might recognise the tag less frequently or, worse still, stop indexing content altogether from that publication altogether.

As Google News placement is important to so many media outlets, Google was quick to point out that the Standout tag is just one of many things its algorithm takes into account when judging where a news article appears on its web site.

At present it's hard to see any difference in Google News' US or UK layout or whether it is placing greater importance on original content. That could simply be due to media outlets not having incorporated the tag into their content management systems yet or that Google is doing its usual slow rollout. µ