Google has provided a news_keywords meta tag to enhance creativity

Google has provided relief to many news websites by announcing a new Meta Keyword tag today. The announcement comes as a response for the notion that the use of keywords restricted the creative space of a writer.

Google has restricted the applicability of this feature to news articles in order to avoid the past demons of keyword spamming. The new feature is not the tag which died years ago, but a novel way from Google to endorse creative writing.

The tag is called ‘news_keywords’ meta tag which attempts to give the news publishers which are sources in Google News some freedom to be more artistic in their headlines and article copy and not pull their hair out thinking about inserting keywords in every news story. Google has limited the use of news keywords to 10 while separating each one of them with a comma.

Google News Product Manager, Rudy Galfi said, “The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.”

He also added, “Similar in spirit to the plain keywords meta tag, the news_keywords meta tag 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.”

The search engine also relayed that the usage of news_keywords meta tag was not a quick way of ranking better in Google News. Google described it as one of the many factors to achieve better ranking with high quality and interesting content at the top of the list.

Related:
Google to launch voice-enabled search app for iPhone
Google tries search experiment, includes Gmail in search results