2014:
(The information below is no longer totally current. The old .co domain we abandoned, and was purchased from Godaddy (I think) by some company that put up a fake The Speaker website with a bunch of garbage articles to try to capture some of the residual traffic the domain will have from our being there for several years.
The current site is not listed on Google News, but probably we will be again once we have more writing being done. It’s not one of our goals, though.)
…
Google News: https://news.google.com/
“thespeaker.co” search result on Google News: “thespeaker.co”
The Speaker is a Google News-listed site. That means articles show up in Google’s news results.
Journalists find this important in at least three ways:
One: Google’s news front page shows what people are reading today. Over time, checking back in with Google News’ front page will give an idea of how news trends over minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years.
Two: Some journalists focus on BREAKING news. They hunt out breaking stories and publish them as fast as possible, so their article is the one that people get new news from.
Take a look at the keywords on the left side of Google News’ front page (and its category pages). These are the same keywords you enter in the meta of your article. Google is pretty clever, though, and it can often figure out an article is about a particular keyword even if there is no meta filled out. When an article is published about a particular keyword (for example, “Tibet”), if that keyword (“Tibet”) is trending on Google News, the article published on The Speaker will appear among all the other new articles on that subject.
Sometimes when a keyword subject begins to trend, there will only be a couple of articles on a given keyword (or none, so your article is the first one). If there are many articles (there usually are when news is popular) Google shows a couple of these on its front page, and the rest only when you click into them (for example, with “see realtime coverage”). Those articles, when displayed on the front page, receive hundreds or thousands of views at time, and from there, so long as the article is of good quality, it is often shared by those readers on social media. How does Google pick? They look for quality. A well-written article, of decent length, with quotes and a lot of information (understood by search engines because the article contains many related keywords), no or little copied content (even quotes), and readers spend a decent amount of time on the page to read it. Google watches how people respond to an article or website. Because The Speaker publishes a lot of high quality articles, readers spend a lot of time on our pages, and search engines recognize this.
This goes for images, too. If an image is tagged with meta (especially alt-text), it can be displayed as the image on the front of Google, even if the article isn’t. Google often mixes and matches this way. They are trying to find the best article and the best image, even if the two aren’t from the same source.
NOTE: The keywords you use also help internet searchers find your article. For example, if your keyword is “Tibet” — your title might be “Tibetans protest in Amdo” — and someone types in just “Tibet” in a search box, they will see a display of articles recognized by the search engine as about Tibet. So long as your article provides the search engine with sufficient clues that it is about Tibet, it will be included. Some searches are for very specific subjects with little competition, some the opposite.
Three: Some journalists monitor a given subject continuously, and Google News trends can tell them a good time to write something. Alternatively, some journalists spend a lot of time crafting an article, and Google News can tell them that the subject is trending and it would be a good time to publish something they’ve been working on.
NOTE: As you will see, some keywords almost never leave. Some appear and disappear in an hour. Some disappear, but reappear almost every day for some time.