Google Gives More Visibility to Local News

Google: More Visibility to Local News Publishers.
Google search may show local news stories more often in Top Stories. Google News Showcase also gets updates.

Local news publishers could get some extra visibility and traffic – both from regular search results and Google News Showcase, Google announced today.

Google ranking improvement
Google announced an improvement to its ranking systems. This change is meant to help searchers discover stories from “authoritative, relevant local news sources.” Google also said this change means local news publications should appear alongside national publications in places like Top Stories.

Google News Showcase panels
Publishers who are part of the Showcase program can now decide which content appears in their local news panels on Google News. Basically, it’s an easy way for publishers to highlight what they consider to be the most important news of the day.

Google News Showcase is Google’s content-license program that pays publishers to curate content via story panels. Since launching News Showcase in October 2020, Google has signed deals with 1,200+ news publications in more than a dozen countries.

You can find the local section of Google News on the left side navigation or in the local section of the For You feed in the Google News app.

Google News Showcase real-time reporting: Also in today’s announcement, Google mentioned that it recently began letting publishers see, in real-time, how readers are engaging with their Showcase content. Google said this data can help publishers quickly respond to what’s trending, add more context to stories, or add related panels to stories gaining traction.