Matt Rogerson, the Director of public policy at Guardian Media Group, posted a Twitter thread dissecting why he believes the claims from The Sun and Mail Online about Google Search mistreating them, are false. He then spent time going through why Google does not rank them well – and it might be heavily around author bylines.
Matt referenced this story on the Press Gazette named The Sun and Mail Online believe they aren’t getting fair share of Google search traffic. Matt then references at least two reasons why The Sun and Mail Online don’t rank as well in Google Search by The Guardian and other publications. Those reasons are:
(1) Speed issues
(2) Issues with original, in-depth, and investigative reporting
The speed issues are easy and I personally doubt it is the main reason why any news organization would not see nice rankings in Google Search. But here is his tweet on that:
6/ I ran them again in Sept ‘21 adding the @Telegraph.
Green is good, red is bad.
We know that Google cites these factors as significant in how sites rank in search, so these data are objective reasons why other one publisher might fare better in search than another. pic.twitter.com/a6dRshYuh5
— Matt Rogerson (@MattRogerson) November 8, 2021
It is the original, in-depth, and investigative reporting issues that I found most revealing. In short, it seems like the majority of the news stories The Daily Mail posts are without named authors, named bylines. Matt cites the search quality raters guidelines:
