LLM Best Practices

News SEO

5 min read

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Overview

News SEO targets two surfaces: Google News and the Top Stories carousel on the regular web SERP. Both are dominated by signed-up publishers with NewsArticle schema, a verified Publisher entity, and the ability to ship a story within an hour of the event. Most ranking happens in the first 24 hours; the page that arrives third is usually invisible. Treat publishing speed, schema accuracy, and publisher reputation as the three load-bearing inputs.

Sign up in Google Publisher Center before the first story

Google News indexes any site that publishes news, but the Publisher Center is where the publisher entity gets verified, the logo gets uploaded, and the news topics get declared. Without a Publisher Center record, the site can still appear in Top Stories on strong queries, but the dedicated Google News surface is closed.

  • Add the publisher logo at 600x60 pixels for the main logo and a square 60x60 for the entity. Both must be on a transparent or solid white background.
  • Declare the topic sections that match the site’s beat. Off-topic stories from a declared “Technology” publisher rank worse than the same story from a generalist site.
  • Verify the domain with Search Console first; the Publisher Center reuses that verification.

Emit NewsArticle JSON-LD with minute-accurate timestamps

Every news page carries a NewsArticle (or Article with articleType: "NewsArticle") block in the same HTML response as the body. The two timestamps that decide ranking are datePublished and dateModified. Both must be ISO 8601 with a timezone offset and accurate to the minute.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "NewsArticle",
  "headline": "Cloudflare drops support for legacy TLS",
  "datePublished": "2026-05-15T08:14:00-07:00",
  "dateModified": "2026-05-15T09:42:00-07:00",
  "author": [{
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Jane Reporter",
    "url": "https://example.com/authors/jane-reporter"
  }],
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "NewsMediaOrganization",
    "name": "Example News",
    "logo": {
      "@type": "ImageObject",
      "url": "https://example.com/logo-600x60.png",
      "width": 600,
      "height": 60
    }
  },
  "image": ["https://example.com/img/cf-tls-16x9.jpg"]
}
</script>

dateModified later than datePublished is normal; bumping dateModified without a real edit is a known anti-pattern that triggers a Helpful Content demotion. See helpful-content-update for the refresh rules.

Author and publisher entities both ship on every story

Top Stories ranking depends on E-E-A-T signals at the author level. The author field must be a Person object with a url that resolves to a real author page, not a string.

  • Each reporter has a dedicated author page with byline history, social profiles, and a short bio.
  • The author page carries Person JSON-LD with sameAs links to LinkedIn, X, and the org email.
  • The Publisher object on every story is the same name and logo across the entire site.

See e-e-a-t for the experience-expertise-authoritativeness-trustworthiness rubric and schema-markup-deep for the Person and Organization fields.

Stable URL slugs, no date in the path

The slug is the permanent identifier. Avoid date segments in the URL because evergreen news stories continue accruing traffic for years and a 2024 date in the URL signals stale content to users.

  • https://example.com/cloudflare-drops-legacy-tls is stable.
  • https://example.com/2026/05/15/cloudflare-drops-legacy-tls ages out and looks dated in the SERP.
  • Year and month segments are acceptable for archive index pages, not for article URLs.
  • Never put the headline draft slug in the URL and rename later; renaming forces a 301 chain. See redirects.

Ship breaking stories in under sixty minutes

Top Stories ranking decays sharply after the first hour. The publish target for breaking news is sixty minutes from the trigger event. Hit that target by:

  • Pre-built page templates with the schema block, author byline, and publisher logo wired in.
  • A “publish now, refine in fifteen minutes” workflow where the first version is two paragraphs plus a quote and dateModified updates as the story grows.
  • Pinging IndexNow on publish so Bing and Yandex index in seconds. See indexnow.
  • Internal links from the homepage and the relevant section page within the first hour; orphaned news pages rank worse.

Skip AMP; it is dead in 2024+

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) lost its ranking advantage in the 2021 Page Experience update and Google dropped AMP from Top Stories eligibility in 2024. Existing AMP pages can be retired by removing the <link rel="amphtml"> tag and 301ing the AMP URL to the canonical. New news sites should ship a fast canonical page and stop there.

Common errors

  • dateModified bumped on deploy without a body change. Google reads this as stale-redating and demotes the site. Update timestamps only when the content changed.
  • Author field as a string instead of a Person object. The story loses author E-E-A-T credit; Top Stories ranking drops.
  • Publisher logo at the wrong dimensions. The carousel renders without the logo or skips the story.
  • Date in the URL path. Forces a rewrite when the story stays relevant; looks stale in the SERP.
  • Slow publish loop. The story arrives after three competitors and never enters the carousel.
  • AMP still shipped in 2026. Pure cost with zero ranking benefit; retire the AMP URLs.

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