Google Releases a 'News Meta Tag' to Help News Rise above the Noise

Google surprised webmasters everywhere with their recent announcement of the roll out of a news_keywords metatag. Meta tags were thought to have outlived their use to the point that they had become a joke within the industry. Leave it to Google to make the joke on us.

This new tag is designed to allow bloggers and news organizations to tag newsworthy posts so that they can insure their post doesn't get mis-categorized by Google. Google explained that sometimes headlines are misleading and to avoid forcing writers to always create a keyword rich headline they decided to create this tag. As Google said here:

"...the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don't need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text."

So it's a quick and easy way to tag your content with keywords that are not necessarily included within the body itself. Although, if they're important enough to tag your content with then it's a good idea to include the same keywords within the content as well.

Here are the directions straight from Google on how to add it to your content going forward:

"One of the best ways to ensure that your site appears for particular user queries is to make sure that your article naturally contains the words, names, and figures that are central to a particular news story. If you create an information-rich site that clearly and accurately describes your topic, you will improve your chances of appearing in our search results for relevant queries.

Our crawler also makes use of a Google-specific metatag to help determine how to best classify your content. By implementing the news_keywords metatag you can specify which keywords are most relevant to your articles. For example, in an article about the World Cup you could add the following code to help Google News better understand the nature of your content:

<meta name="news_keywords" content="World Cup, Brazil 2014, Spain vs Netherlands">

Keywords could also be used to help disambiguate between related terms. Again, if this particular publisher want...