In a post on the official Google News Blog, Google has warned publishers that publishing content that fails to clearly discriminate between editorial and advertising may harm their ranking and Google News SEO.
The decline of traditional advertising revenue has forced publishers to devise new methods of generating income from their content. One method that has rapidly gained popularity in recent months is native advertising.
Native advertising is akin to the traditional advertorial. Publishers publish promotional posts with much of the same context as editorial content. Such articles might include a subtle note stating they are promotional content. However, they look almost exactly like the regular content of the site.
While bloggers are well acquainted with the promotional guest post
There is intense controversy surrounding the use of native advertising on more traditional news platforms. The Atlantic recently caused a stir. They published a glowing article about Scientology. They did not clearly state that they had been paid for it. Therefore, readers couldn’t recognize that it wasn’t objective reporting.
Similar flurries of discontent resulted from Buzz FeedGawker and The Huffington Post’s native advertising experiments. Traditionally, publishers have been — in theory, at least — careful to separate their editorial content from their advertising, for obvious reasons. As the Google News blog article points out:
It’s difficult for one to be trusted when the subject of an article is paying them, or when they are selling or monetizing links within an article.
While people often ignore it, they consider editorial independence the most important aspect of true journalistic integrity. If readers cannot distinguish between real news and paid promotions, then the credibility of all content from that publisher becomes questionable.
What goes for human readers also applies to search engine algorithms. Google wants to ensure Google News serves as a valuable resource for news seekers. To achieve this, they work to keep advertising and promotional content separate from news reporting. If its crawlers can’t distinguish between the two, then the value of Google News to its readers declines significantly.
Google has decided to warn publishers. They are making it clear that Google will take action if they find a significant failure to distinguish between news and promotional content. This action could include manual penalties on sites.
They might even delist some sites entirely. Google News drives a lot of traffic to these sites. However, once visitors arrive, publishers need ways to earn money from them. This creates a difficult situation for publishers. It will likely worsen the already strained relationship between Google and traditional news organizations.
