Richard Nazarewicz talks with Jason Barnard about technical & product SEO for news.

Richard Nazarewicz has worked across the digital spectrum for the past 20 years, typically demystifying complex search and optimization solutions to enable all business units to integrate search and SEO. In his current role at The Wall Street Journal, he focuses on product, technical and news SEO to make SEO a key component of WSJ, Dow Jones and News Corp. strategy. Originally from Caversham, Reading in the UK, he began his career during the dot-com boom as a consultant at Digital Computer Corporation, where one of the first search engines - Altavista - was developed and Web 1.0 was born. From there he began writing white papers on Windows NT server clustering on DEC Alpha servers, which was very advanced at the time. The Altavista browser at the time was primarily used as a tool to demonstrate the backend storage and server solutions he was working on. In 2002, he moved to Madrid, Spain to co-found a digital startup agency and worked as a consultant, SEO, digital producer, technical lead and project manager across Europe and the US with digital agencies like Ogilvy and clients like Microsoft, HP, Pepe Jeans, British Council and Katie Couric.

Google wants to provide the nbest local, national and global news service to its users, on the SERP, in the News Vertical and in Discover. Imagine the task it has - keeping up to date in real time(often within seconds), distinguishing out of date news articles from current news articles, deciding which sources to show (many sites carry the same news). How can publishers help Google achieve its goals and thus get themselves more visibility in Google's News channels? That is the key question for any news organisation: local, national or global. Fascinating.

In this incredibly brilliant episode, Jason Barnard and Richard Nazarewicz dive deep into the more technical aspect of SEO for news. How optimising for the top stories on Google News is critical. And how paywalling works for website content and how Google is able to crawl and index paywall content are just some of the exciting topics discussed.

In addition to a detailed explanation of how to set up a Google News publisher, Richard also offers some delightful tidbits about Google Discover and Google News Sitemaps.

As always, the show ends with passing the baton… Richard passes the virtual baton to next week’s absolutely incredible guest, Mickie Kennedy.

What you’ll learn from Richard Nazarewicz

00:00 Richard Nazarewicz and Jason Barnard01:17 The Wall Street Journal's Knowledge Panel01:34 Knowledge Panel Hopping01:43 Knowledge Panel Tips from Jason Barnard03:15 Knowledge Panel Management05:47 Brand SERP: Ask Jason Anything05:56 Brand SERP and Knowledge Panel Support Group06:25 Overview of Technical and Product SEO for News08:33 Richard Nazarewicz's Area of Expertise09:14 What is Paywalling and How Does Google Handle it?10:09 The Importance of Flexible Sampling for Paywall12:09 Richard Nazarewicz’s Experience with Google Discover16:45 What is a Propensity Model?18:30 What is the Google News Publisher Center?20:42 NASA’s Vertical Brand SERP20:55 NASA on Google News 22:15 Optimising for Top Stories on Google News23:09 Setting Up Google News Publisher25:23 How does Google Use News Sitemaps?32:58 Passing the Baton: Richard Nazarewicz to Mickie Kennedy

This episode was recorded live on video September 27th 2022

Recorded live at Kalicube Tuesdays (Digital Marketing Livestream Event Series). Watch the video now >>