September 25th, 2011 
Social Guy
Yesterday, during a Google News workshop at the Online News Association conference in Boston, Google has announced a twist in the automated news-feed algorithm – organizations can add “standout” (a new link rel attribute) metadata tags to mark their best stories.
Google News (for the US edition) will use this information as a signal for labeling news stories as “featured” on the home page and in News search results. But there’s no guarantee “standout” stories will be featured, the company said.
“We can showcase that standout piece of journalism in Google News by putting a ‘featured’ label in front of it,” said Google News product specialist David Smydra, who announced the new option at the Online News Association conference in Boston. “And that featured label will help that article persist while other news organizations are following and developing their coverage on that story.”
The syntax for this new tag is as follows:
- The tag should be placed in the <head> section of the source code on the page
- <link rel=”standout” href=”URL”>
Example :
- <link rel=”standout” href=“http://www.example.com/article.html” />
If a news provider puts the standout tag on more than seven stories in a week, Google’s algorithm won’t factor in the tag from that company as much, or may ignore it, Google warned. News organizations can also use a standout tag to highlight strong work by other providers.
To be clear, Standout tags are just one signal among the many signals that algorithmically determine prominence on Google News.
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