Yesterday Google announced an algorithmic update it made to the search results a few months ago have been doing a better job at promoting original reporting. Not only promoting it in terms of ranking but keeping that original reporting up in the top spot of the search results for longer.

This began rolling out a few months ago and Google told me it was and still is something they tweak all the time. It is not perfect, so they keep trying to make it better all the time. This is also a global rollout, so not just in the US. Danny Sullivan said it is unrelated to the core updates and he doesn't have a specific date to tell us when this rolled out.

Also, this has rolled out in search but not yet in Google News or Google Discover, that is coming soon, I am told.

I covered this update in a lot of detail at Search Engine Land but that is the gist of it above. It is hard to say if any of my unconfirmed Google algorithm update posts covered this or not. News stuff is harder to track than evergreen web page changes.

Here is Danny's tweet on this:

It's not part of the core update. It's also not just one big thing -- as the post said, there have been various ranking updates. I don't have a specific time frame. — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 12, 2019

Here is Richard Gingras, VP of Google News, who made this announcement:

Original reporting in journalism requires time and investment but it can have a big impact on our communities and conversations. Here's what Google is doing to further enhance how we identify and highlight original reporting. https://t.co/uTErhkFYzQ — Richard Gingras (@richardgingras) September 12, 2019

I explained in my SEL post why Google waited to tell us about this a few months after it launched. It was two fold (1) Google is now happy with the results but says it can always get better and (2) the search quality raters guidelines update had specific things in it to help the third-party raters now judge how good of a job Google is doing here.

Of course, as I expected, some felt this means humans are manually adjusting the search results. They are not! Google just added into the raters guidelines how these raters can tell Google how well of a job the algorithms are doing.

That's not exactly correct (nor new nor news-specific). We build algorithmic systems. Then we assess how well those systems do using human raters. Those ratings help us tune the algorithms. But ratings of sites/pages do NOT go directly into our systems.... https://t.co/vyDnkhp0AA pic.twitter.com/FVxvM0CZDs — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 12, 2019

We announced today that our *algorithmic* systems are working to do a better job surfacing original content *and* that raters have new guidelines to ensure they're better assessing if this is actually showing. That feedback helps us tune the systems https://t.co/PecA9htV1v pic.twitter.com/cbAGnLX93v — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 12, 2019

So this is an algorithmic thing, not a human thing...

I also asked Google if this helps smaller publishers who break stuff before bigger publishers but don't get credit. Google said they hope so but didn't really confirm that with me. Here is how Danny answered it later on Twitter:

I don't recall arguing. I'm in complete agreement that we should reward authoritative original content, period -- doesn't matter the size or age of the outlet. I do think this update will help move us better toward that goal. — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 12, 2019

Have any publishers here noticed these changes? I am a publisher and I can say, I don't think I noticed this.

Forum discussion at Twitter.