How Top Stories works
A detailed breakdown of Top Stories and the algorithm behind it. Every publisher SEO's favourite worst enermy
TL;DR
Top Stories is a Google SERP feature highlighting popular news content. It prioritises publisher authority, content relevancy, user engagement and freshness
Top Stories is a real-time experiment that runs in 10 minute increments.
Google prioritises articles with high-quality user engagement. CTR and click quality are the most prominent factors
Publishers aiming to appear in Top Stories should be a serious news publisher and utilise relevant structured data and a Google News sitemap
What are Top Stories?
Top Stories is a selection of up to around seven articles at the top of your SERP. The feature is implemented algorithmically when a keyword reaches a certain level of popularity and becomes defined as ‘news-oriented.’ The ‘more news’ button below the carousel takes you directly to related articles on the Google News tab.
It’s designed to mainly feature ‘top’ publishers arguably to combat fake news. The below is an excellent example of that.
The reason it’s so popular in publisher circles is the sheer volume of traffic it drives, particularly for big publishers. Google would probably say trusted publishers, but in reality, it’s dominated by big publishers. Publishers with millions of pages and links, a storied history and big budgets. Output matters when it comes to Top Stories.
But if you can get there, it’s worth it.
How can publishers feature in Top Stories?
There’s no definitive way to feature in Top Stories. But becoming a verified news source by Google is step one. Around five years ago, you needed to go through an approval process via Google’s Publisher Centre.
As of 2024, publishers no longer need to be verified to be eligible for Google News or Top Stories. They are automatically considered. Whilst submitting your site to Google’s Publisher Centre is no longer a must for publishers, you can gain a little control by submitting;
Size variations of your site logo
Fonts you’d like to be used in Google products
The correct email address and subscribe to technical and product email updates from Google
Your publication URLs - blog, news etc
In my opinion, it is down to impact (links and mentions), consistency over time and publishing volumes. There’s no quick fix and for many brands it takes years and years.
Foundations of becoming a news publisher in Google
Google gives some typically measly guidance about how to become a trusted news source on the platform. There are two main topics you should be aware of;
Ranking within Google News: Where the news algorithm - content relevance, prominence, authority, freshness, location and language - is described and defined
Google News policies: Content that violates wider search policies (dangerous content, deceptive practices, harassing, hateful, violent and sexually explicit content amongst others) won’t be eligible for news content
This is Google’s way of saying ‘don’t be a dick’ in 4,500 words. Ironic given their current ways of working with publishers and independent brands, but hey-ho.
What’s in your control?
Several elements in your control improve your chances of featuring in Top Stories and becoming a verified news publisher.
You must be a brand with a serious focus on news.
It should be a key part of your business model. A typically vague Google statement.
Use a Google News XML sitemap
A Google News Sitemap gives Google a 48-hour look at the articles you publish, including the headline, modified date and URL.
Use publisher and news-specific schema
News content, particularly content targeting the Top Stories box, should give as much context to crawlers as possible. So utilising NewsArticle and LiveBlogPosting schema in the head of the page (use JSON-LD, not microdata) will give you a better chance of ranking
Submit your site via the Publisher Centre - as above
Optimise your images - CTR is a key factor in how Google determines quality content
Google’s reliance on engagement signals is magnified in Top Stories. Articles are ranked in seconds and changed constantly, as fresh content is continually pumped into the ecosystem. So having a standout Featured and OG image is crucial. Honestly, this is such a simple yet overlooked facet of news SEO and Top Stories. You need a good image.
Publication volumes - Unfortunately, Google has created an ecosystem where the volume of content you publish is a significant indicator of a) success and b) ranking in Top Stories.
All things being equal, increasing your publishing volumes is a good thing. As long as you can maintain a level of quality. But as Top Stories is essentially a live experiment, if an article doesn’t land, spinning it into multiple news stories, videos, galleries and so on gives you a greater chance of success.
Don’t abuse any of Google’s publishing guidelines - also as above
Publishers manipulate the Top Stories algorithm by cloning articles about popular topics and redirecting the old to the new. This works for two reasons - one, that Google prefers fresh content and cannot delineate between new articles and cloned ones. Presumably because everything happens so quickly in Top Stories.
And two, because Top Stories is one big stinking live test that relies on ever increasing volumes of content. An algorithm with a never ending suite of content to choose from.
How does Google choose the Top Stories?
In a word, algorithmically. This almost real-time content experiment is made up of a blend of publisher authority, relevancy (of publisher and content), user engagement, location and the freshness of content. The pedants among you may say, ‘isn’t freshness part of content relevancy?’
Yes, probably. But I’m writing the article.
Publisher authority, relevancy and trust
By authority, I don’t mean domain authority. A much maligned metric that post the algorithm leak has, I think had something of a renaissance. I mean more topical authority. You need to be an authoritative source about the topic at hand.
This means you have generated citations and mentions from relevant brands in that space and that you’ve written about the topic for yonks. A strong signal of both topical authority and trust.
Relevancy can be boiled down to a couple of key factors - relevancy to the reader (think location or historical data) and to the topic at hand. If every publisher talks about a key moment in the presidential election, it’s unlikely you’ll rank for the topic by analysing the 1972 presidential election.
Even if it was a doozy.
Headlines
Engaging, well-optimised headlines are crucial for encouraging CTR and clarifying the article's contents for Google. Yes, yes, other search engines are available.
You should be aware there are five different types of headlines you should care about as a publisher SEO;
The page title (SEO headline)
The h1 (on page headline)
Structured data headline
Sitemap headline
Internal link or navigational headline
For Top Stories, the page title and on-page headline are the most important but don’t neglect the structured data and sitemap headlines. It’s common for them to be pulled from either the SEO or on-page headline.
Make sure the headline is well optimised, highly clickable and contains all the main entities.
Entities
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Entity SEO, that’s just another word for SEO. Why do you have to overcomplicate things?
Normally I’d agree with you. But headlines are different. Headlines are all about entities. The person, organisation and location are all prime factors in encouraging quality clicks. People search for at least one of these key entities.
If you can get an article to rank for Donald Trump, Puerto Rico and the election, you’re laughing.
CTR
Articles that achieve longevity in Top Stories have one thing in common. People care about them. Like any algorithm, engagement is at the heart of it. And articles with a strong CTR show one thing. The headline and/or image are clickable enough that people take action.
So make sure your headline and image, both featured and OG, are top quality.
If you have two articles, one with a CTR of 16% and the other with a CTR of 10%, which do you think are the first to be replaced? If you aren’t serving the user as well as the competition, you’re outta there.
Content freshness
Google loves fresher content. Even if it is inexplicably still rubbish at pulling through correct dates. I don’t mean to go off on a tangent and I’m aware I’m not a developer. But is it really that complicated to pull an accurate last updated date through into the search results? Anyway, I digress.
Nowhere is Google’s love of fresher content more prominent than in Top Stories. The more recent your content, the more likely you are to rank. It’s rare that anything more than a day ago ranks well.
The table below shows the average position per timestamp of nearly 15,000 URLs for US Election coverage. There is a very positive correlation between fresher, more up-to-date content and stronger ranking.
Location
The user’s location plays a key role in what they will see in the news box. Someone based in New York is going to see a completely different set of stories than someone in California, who will see something completely different to someone based in London.
People’s political beliefs, search patterns and ways of consuming content are nuanced. Having a single news box to cater for everyone doesn’t make sense in 2024. The further we go down the putrid algorithm hole (apologies for the imagery), the more personalised content recommendations become.
So if you’re optimising for news, make sure you have a location in mind. Whether that’s at a town, city or national level.
Click quality
Once we’ve passed the CTR test, it’s all about click quality. We know that Google tracks user interactions to rank pages. It helps Google evaluate the quality of a page. Something an algorithm cannot understand at a human level.
With traditional search results, this is easy. Google has months to establish quality user engagement. But Top Stories results are ranked in seconds. So is Google able to establish the quality of a click in such a limited timeframe?
Yes. That’s where Navboost and Glue come in.
Navboost and Glue
Navboost is a search ranking system that considers a user’s navigational interactions when ranking pages. The quality of a user’s click is one of Google’s foundational ranking factors. Navboost also uses click data from over the last 13 months to help rank articles.
By taking demographic, device, and browser data et al into account, it helps Google create cohorts or slices of data based on who we are as a group.
If you’re a 33 year old man living in Stoke Newington with a bad haircut and a big mortgage, you’re more likely to like content that other East London dwelling 33 year olds have previously expressed an interest in.
Clearly, that doesn’t have any particular value for Top Stories. But that’s where Glue comes in. Or maybe more aptly, Instant Glue. According to Google’s VP of Search, Pandu Nayak, “Glue is just another name for Navboost that includes all the features on the page.” So Navboost covers traditional blue links and Glue stores and analyses very diverse user interactions, to determine when and where a search feature is triggered.
As Nayak was pushed, we learned about Instant Glue. It was described as “a real-time pipeline aggregating the same fractions of user-interaction signals as Glue, but only from the last 24 hours of logs, with a latency of ~10 minutes.”
A ranking system that aggregates user interaction data in real time to ensure ranking signals understand the current state of play. This combination of trending data and real-time user engagement signals is exactly how Top Stories is able to function.
That’s why I call it a live experiment.
While there’s no official documentation about Navboost, The Google Leak, Pandu Nayak’s testimony from the 2023 Anti-Trust Trial and Google API documentation does give use some clues.
How publishers can optimise for Top Stories
First of all, you need to rank. And that’s hard. It’s so difficult to become a publisher Google ‘trusts’ enough to rank.
You need to start small by targeting less competitive niches, publishing consistently, generating high-quality backlinks and mentions and fostering strong user engagement over time.
In summary;
Get serious about news
Become an authority on a topic
Grow your publishing volumes
Be consistent
Utilise structured data
And a Google News sitemap
Utilise authors, build strong E-E-A-T and evangelise page accuracy
Content freshness
Foster strong user engagement in the SERPs and on-page
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