News and Publisher SEO Consulting

Large archives are one of the most operationally painful problems in publisher SEO. When a site carries hundreds of thousands of URLs – tag pages, paginated archives, duplicate story variants, syndicated content – Googlebot has to decide what to crawl and how often. Left unmanaged, the result is crawl waste: Googlebot spending its allocation on low-value pages instead of discovering today’s stories.

We audit crawl behaviour using log file analysis alongside Search Console data to identify where crawl budget is being consumed, which URL classes are creating noise, and what needs to be consolidated, noindexed, or restructured.

Google News inclusion is not automatic, and maintaining it is not passive. News sitemaps need to be scoped correctly, updated within the two-day article window, and kept free of errors that signal poor hygiene. Small sitemap errors can silently reduce crawl frequency for new content across the whole site.

Top Stories is one of the highest-visibility surfaces in Google Search. Appearing there requires more than writing about a current topic. NewsArticle or Article schema needs to be implemented correctly at the template level – accurate headline fields, properly formatted date values, author markup, image requirements, and paywall flags where subscription content is involved.

Most publisher teams produce two types of content: fast-turn news and durable informational pieces. Evergreen content that ranks well today can quietly decay if never updated. Breaking news covered repeatedly can split ranking signals across multiple similar URLs. We work with editorial and digital teams to define rules for when to update, republish, or consolidate.

Poorly structured archives force Googlebot to crawl many pages to find a small number of high-value ones. Topic pages with thin content and long pagination chains absorb crawl budget without returning value. We review archive architecture and internal linking patterns to identify where structure is suppressing discoverability.

Publishers cover the same topics repeatedly. The problem is when repeated coverage creates internal competition that dilutes ranking signals rather than consolidating them. We identify cannibalisation patterns using Search Console data combined with SERP analysis, then recommend a consolidation approach that protects existing traffic.

AMP is no longer a requirement for Top Stories. For many publishers, it is now legacy infrastructure that creates maintenance overhead without meaningful performance benefit. The right answer depends on your current AMP traffic volume, Core Web Vitals performance on canonical pages, and your team’s capacity to maintain two versions. We give a straightforward recommendation based on your situation. No default answer.

Google’s Helpful Content updates have made trust signals materially more important for news publishers. E-E-A-T for news means: named authors with verifiable credentials, author pages that establish expertise and editorial history, clear publication policies around corrections and transparency, and signals that help Google understand who is responsible for the content.