google-news-logoGoogle is implementing a new “standout” meta tag for use with the US version of Google News. News organizations can use this tag to indicate articles by themselves or others that they feel are especially newsworthy. The idea is that they slip it into the headers of articles they feel are among their best work, and those articles may end up with a “featured” label on Google News.

News organizations are asked to use the tag no more than seven times per week on their own content. However, they can use it as many times as they want in reference to content from other publications.

Standout Content tags work best when news publishers recognize not just their own quality content, but also the original journalistic contributions of others when your stories draw from the standout efforts of other publications. Linking out to other sites is well recognized as a best practice on the web, and we believe that citing others’ standout content is important for earning trust as you also promote your own standout work.

Google emphasizes that the tag is just one among many factors that are used to generate page ranks for news stories, and that it needs to be adopted by the community for it to work. It will be interesting to see whether that ends up happening.

Whether it does or not, it’s certainly one way that digital news sources can prove to be more flexible and functional than paper.

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