What is Google Top Stories?
Google Top Stories is a result format that often appears in SERPs related to facts or names related to current events. In fact, it is a feature that puts together a few articles (usually three) from various web sources.
The Google Top Stories carousel has excellent visibility in SERPs and, as a result, is an excellent source of organic traffic.
How does Google Top Stories appear?
The “Top Stories” section appears at the top of the Google results page when users enter a query related to recent news. In practice, it is a selection that automatically highlights news and content deemed relevant to the user’s search.
In addition to the most visible results – those that make up the carousel – the Top Stories section contains a link to other relevant articles and content on Google News.
How does Google Top Stories work?
Google Search introduced the Top Stories carousel in 2016, adding this SERP feature to the others already present on both desktop and mobile. We can say that through this feature, Google has three goals:
- create a simple and engaging way of interacting with the news;
- provide a differentiated point of view on current events;
- to suggest users trusted sites that can ensure a positive reading experience.
Google uses the full power of machine learning to select, collect and rank articles based on their relevance. In this sense, Google rewards so-called “original news” or content that it believes contains new facts and information with unpublished points of view.
How can you get into the Google Top Stories?
Most of the content that arrives in the Google Top Stories carousel (the one shown in the search results) comes from editorial-type sites. However, it is not excluded that articles published on blogs or other websites can also arrive there!
It is not strictly necessary that your site deals with news or that it is subscribed to Google News. But it is essential that your website:
- complies with the rules of content publication;
- has optimized some key aspects that affect ranking (timeliness, relevance, and language of the article, among others).
Until some time ago, to appear in Top Stories, you also needed to serve the page in AMP format, but recently Google has stated that this is no longer a fundamental requirement. These are the words of Patrick Kettner, Developer Advocate of Google, in one of the videos of the series “Getting Started with Page Experience”:
“The Top Stories Carousel previously only featured on AMP pages to give news readers the best experience: but, with the introduction of Web Vitals, the Main News carousel can now represent all relevant pages, regardless of what was used to make them.”
The central evaluation metric for ranking is now Page Experience, which combines the analysis of essential web signals (Core Web Vitals) with a whole series of metrics related to usability and quality of navigation on the page – such as the site’s adaptability on mobile, the presence of HTTPS, etc.
Of course, even though the on-page experience is essential, Google still tries to rank pages based on the best information contribution. Put another way, and great content will likely prevail even if the user experience on the page is subpar. However, if you’re competing against many similar articles in terms of relevance, the quality of the user experience becomes a determining factor in ranking.
How WordLift can help your content to get on Google Top Stories
WordLift helps your website speak Google’s “native language” by converting your content into structured data that search engines understand perfectly… and all this automatically, using natural language processing and machine learning.
WordLift’s AI can understand your content and create your Knowledge Graph, an architecture that allows search engines to more easily gather information from your site. The result? More visibility, more traffic, and, inevitably, more customers.
The content linked to the Knowledge Graph will also be more contextualized and ideally linked to other related articles, full of relevant information. A real boon in terms of relevance and relevance, which Google will not fail to reward.
[Do you want to understand better the advantages of implementing a Knowledge Graph? Read this article]
As we have seen before Google is evolving, putting more and more the user experience at the centre of its attention. A well-structured, well-linked, data-rich site does precisely that: it builds a smooth and pleasant environment for users first, which in turn leads search engines to favour you.
With WordLift, you can do all this – or instead, WordLift does it for you. Get your content loved by users and search engines, and get ready to get into the Top Stories!