{"id":9861,"date":"2021-01-11T12:36:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-11T11:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordlift.io\/blog\/en\/?p=9861"},"modified":"2022-08-09T14:37:39","modified_gmt":"2022-08-09T12:37:39","slug":"top-stories-carousel-checklist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordlift.io\/blog\/en\/top-stories-carousel-checklist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ultimate Checklist to Rank in the Google Top Stories Carousel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google Top Stories is a powerful way to boost mobile SEO and CTR of news content. This article describes a real-world implementation, what it takes to be picked up by Google, and how to measure the traffic impact.   <\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\r\n

When Google first introduced the <\/span>top stories carousel<\/b>, it had an immediate impact on the news and media industry that started to embrace the support for AMP pages. Top Stories are a modern, ultra-performing card-style design<\/strong> to present searchers with featured news stories in Google SERP.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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Top Stories Carousel in Google Search<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n

Getting featured is far from being a straightforward process as several requirements need to be fulfilled<\/strong>, and these requirements belong to different aspects of modern SEO: from AMP <\/em>support<\/strong><\/span> to Google News<\/a><\/em><\/strong> support<\/strong> (not required, while highly recommended), from structured data<\/a><\/em><\/strong> to content editing<\/em><\/strong>, image preparation<\/em><\/strong> and page speed optimization<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Let\u2019s dive in and look at very basic by analyzing what we have done to bring this ultra-performing search feature to one of our SEO management service<\/a><\/strong> clients. Before doing that, as usual, I like to show you the results of this work. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

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The effect of the top stories as seen from the Google Search Console.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n
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The top stories news carousel is an <\/span>ultra-performing SERP feature<\/b> that strictly depends on your organic rankings<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

How are articles selected to be featured in the Google Top Stories Carousel?<\/h2>\r\n

The Top News Carousel features useful and timely stories that cover specific news. Even the websites that are not registered as news sites with Google have a (small) chance to appear in the carousel. In other words, blogs and other sources can be included.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Let me be clear: I\u2019m not saying that it is easy for blogs to get a spot. It is possible, but being registered as a news site helps a lot as you will learn by reading further. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

As stated in <\/span>this blog post<\/span><\/a>, Google also features notable quotes and opinion pieces. It aims to offer its users detailed and diverse angles to get a deeper understanding of the news. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

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We\u2019ve continued to bring new improvements to Search to help people better orient themselves around a topic and easily explore related ideas, so they can more quickly go from having a question in mind to developing deeper understanding.<\/span><\/i>
<\/span><\/i>Smarter organization of top stories in Search, Duncan Osborn, Product Manager, Google Search<\/span><\/i><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Google is now using machine learning<\/a> to select, gather, and order the news by importance. Therefore, Mountain View\u2019s search engine uses the tried-and-tested scores method.<\/span> To learn more about how stories are selected as top news using scores, read this <\/span>in-depth blog post by Bill Slawsky<\/span><\/a>, the world-expert about patents and white papers from the search engines.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

What are the best practices to optimize an article for Google Top Stories Carousel?<\/b><\/h2>\r\n

Here is the checklist you need to follow to grab this mobile<\/strong><\/span> SEO opportunity<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

1. Enable AMP <\/span><\/h3>\r\n

A top stories carousel is presented in the <\/span>Google Developers Guide<\/span><\/a> as a Search Feature that requires AMP implementation. So you need to support AMP<\/a> on your website either as a native or paired mode. Unless you are starting to develop a new project from scratch you are going to use AMP in paired mode. This basically means that you are reusing the active theme’s templates to display AMP responses. With this configuration, AMP uses a separate URL, whether the canonical URLs for your site will not have AMP. You can use the <\/span>AMP Test Tool<\/span><\/a> to ensure that your pages comply with Google Search requirements for AMP.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Update<\/b>: Google has announced that in 2021 it is going to launch the <\/span>Page Experience Update<\/b><\/a>.<\/span> As it will go live, AMP will no longer be a requirement for the top stories section. In 2020, Google has already experimented with not-AMP news on the news carousel, primarily related to COVID-19 updates. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

Anyway, unless your website is hugely performant in terms of speed, <\/span>AMP is still <\/b>an excellent<\/b> choice to serve mobile users with a better experience<\/b>. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

1a. Comply with AMP logo guidelines<\/span><\/h4>\r\n

You need to make sure that the logo used to represent the publisher used in the structured data from AMP fits in a 60x600px rectangle, and either be exactly 60px high (preferred), or exactly 600px wide. A logo 450x45px would not be acceptable, even though it fits within the 600x60px rectangle.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

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Remember also when you have a logo with a solid background to include 6px minimum padding around it. <\/span>Wanna see an example? Here is WordLift Publisher\u2019s logo<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

<\/span>2. Use structured data to markup your articles<\/span><\/h3>\r\n

Google describes the news carousel as \u201ca container that includes articles, live blogs, and videos\u201d and what helps Google understand the content on the page is the <\/span>required structured data. <\/b>So the second step is to make sure that you are supporting one of the following schema types:<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Article<\/span><\/a><\/p>\r\n