Matt Rogerson analyzes why The Guardian outperforms Sun and Mail Online in Google Search

Matt Rogerson, the director of public order for the Guardian Media Group, wrote: Twitter Thread analyzes why he believes The Sun and Mail Online’s claims that Google Search is mistreating them are false. Then he spent time trying to figure out why Google didn’t rank them well – and it could be a lot of author’s notes.

Matt referred to this story in the Press Gazette called The Sun and Mail Online believe they are not getting a fair share of Google search traffic. Matt then points out at least two reasons why The Sun and Mail Online don’t rank as well on Google searches for The Guardian and other publications. These reasons are:

(1) Speed ​​issues (2) Issues with original, detailed, and investigative reporting

The speed issues are simple and I personally doubt this is the main reason news organizations wouldn’t see good rankings in Google Search. But here’s his tweet about it:

6 / I ran them again in September ’21 by adding those @Telegraph.

Green is good, red is bad.

We know that Google cites these factors as determining how websites rank in search. So this data is an objective reason why another publisher might do better than another publisher when it comes to searches. pic.twitter.com/a6dRshYuh5

– Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) November 8, 2021

It’s the original, in-depth, and investigative reporting issues that I found most illuminating. In short, it seems that most of the messages in The Daily Mail are posts without named authors, named bylines. Matt quotes the guidelines for evaluating search quality:

8th/ @Google may not be as successful as publishers would like in this regard (see Sun’s concerns in the article at 1 /), but one outcome is likely that web sites that rely heavily on news agency content will suffer in search performance.

– Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) November 8, 2021

Then he digs into categories of stories and who wrote those stories. Here’s how he did it:

10 / I’ve flagged the dates where there is a ‘named byline’, ‘generic’ (i.e. DM reporter), ‘agency’ copy (z available).

– Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) November 8, 2021

Here’s what he came up with:

12 / When searching for “Covid”, almost 60% of the content of an agency is credited, just over 3% through a named byline.https://t.co/HUC90vrC5e pic.twitter.com/8UZNDx1UNt

– Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) November 8, 2021

14 / In our newspaper too @Ofcom, I noticed areas where the DM excels when searching, with “Kim Kardashian” being a case in point.

Agency texts make up only 3% here, while generic or named by-lines make up 20%.

A big difference to the first 3 terms.https://t.co/Xpugc4LjuU pic.twitter.com/PI5IgWXmjN

– Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) November 8, 2021

15 / If DM’s own search function is correct + considering a percentage of the authors who are not categorized, the data indicate that of the approx. 4.8 million articles in the DM archive, more than 50% are directly from news agencies come. pic.twitter.com/EvNndKIsSE

– Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) November 8, 2021

Look at how small the “named byline” piece of the cake is. I’m not sure how it compares to The Guardian or other publications, but honestly I’m shocked that this number is so low.

His conclusion:

17 /… Objective data suggest that factors other than subjectivity may play a role, such as @Google classifies the DM in comparison to other publishers.

But I would appreciate thoughts from more experienced experts than me. I do not pretend to be an expert !!

– Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) November 8, 2021

What do you all mean? Is this the power of Bylines or just that it is a signal that the content was not “original, in-depth, and investigative coverage”.

Forum discussion at Twitter.