What are the Top Stories on Google?
A popular result style in SERPs for names or data associated with current events is Google Top Stories. In actuality, it is a function that compiles a few articles (often three) from other websites.
The Google Top Stories carousel is a fantastic source of organic traffic because it has great visibility in SERPs.
How are Top Stories displayed on Google?
When users input a search term relevant to recent news, the "Top Stories" section appears at the top of the Google results page. In actuality, it is a choice that automatically highlights articles and other items that the system deems pertinent to the user's search.
The Top Stories section also includes a link to further pertinent articles and content on Google News in addition to the results that are most obvious and comprise the carousel.
The functioning of Google Top Stories
In 2016, Google Search added the Top Stories carousel to its lineup of SERP features, which previously included desktop and mobile versions. Google can be said to be pursuing three objectives with this feature:
build a user experience that is both basic and interesting news, offer readers a unique perspective on current events, and recommend reputable websites that may guarantee a satisfying reading experience.
Google selects, gathers, and ranks articles based on their relevancy by utilizing the full power of machine learning. In this sense, Google rewards so-called "original news" or content that it thinks has fresh information and viewpoints that haven't been published before.
How does one enter Google Top Stories?
The majority of the information that appears in the Google Top Stories carousel (the one displayed in the search results) originates from websites that are primarily editorial in nature. There is, however, a chance that material from blogs or other websites will also get there!
It's not absolutely necessary for your website to deal with news or it is a Google News subscriber. However, it's imperative that your website:
obeys the guidelines for content release; several important ranking factors have been optimized (timeliness, relevance, and language of the article, among others).
It used to be necessary to serve the page in AMP format in order to appear in Top Stories, but Google has announced that this is no longer a prerequisite. In one of the videos from the "Getting Started with Page Experience" series, Google Developer Advocate Patrick Kettner said the following:
To provide news readers with the optimal experience, the Top Stories Carousel formerly only appeared on AMP pages. However, with the launch of Web Vitals, the Main News Carousel can now reflect regardless of the methods employed to create them, important pages."
Page Experience, which combines the analysis of critical web signals (Core Web Vitals) with a wide range of metrics related to usability and quality of navigation on the page, such as the site's responsiveness on mobile, the presence of HTTPS, etc., has taken the lead as the main evaluation metric for ranking.
Of course, Google still attempts to rank pages based on the best information contribution even though the on-page experience is crucial. To put it another way, even if a page's user experience is mediocre, strong content will likely still succeed. However, the quality of the user experience becomes a deciding factor in ranking if you're up against several items that are relevantly comparable.