Do you have any specific tips for news sites?

Matt's answer:

SPEAKER: We have a question from Kate in the US. Kate asks do you have any specific tips for news sides, which have unique concerns compared with commercial sites? For example, if I have a developing news story, should I keep updating the same page or create a new one when the content changes? Great question. I think, for example, on that particular one, if it were me, I would tend to have one page, because that’s where all the page rank can accumulate, people don’t get confused. Sometimes you even see people doing multiple stories over several days, and they don’t link those stories together so that from one story you can get to the other story, and so you sort of lose a few people through the cracks that way. So Marissa Mayer, in the past, has talked about having living topics or topic pages that are really exhaustive entries about a specific area or type of breaking news. And so, you can see something like Wikipedia is another example where they have one page that just gets richer and more developed. So at some point, a news story is over, and you want to move on to creating a new page. But given a certain story, often, I think it can be helpful to add updates or add more information on the same URL. There’s a lot of other stuff you can think about. Do read Google News documentation. There’s some meta tags and other tags that they have available that aren’t available to other people or that Google News treats specially. You might also think about using Authorship, so that’s a way that you can mark up so that we can understand, more accurately, who wrote a particular story or who wrote a particular page. There’s a lot of stuff there. If you’re a news site, I would do a little bit of research along those lines as well. But if you’re doing just a developing news story, I would probably keep it all on a page or one long page, if at all possible, just because that lets everybody know that one URL that they should point people to.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: