Key Takeaway

The Google crawler also makes use of a Google-specific metatag to help determine how to best classify your content. By implementing the news_keywords metatag you can specify which keywords are most relevant to your articles. For example, in an article about the World Cup you could add the following code to help Google News better understand the nature of your content:

<meta name=”news_keywords” content=”World Cup, Quatar 2022, Starting in November”>

Keywords could also be used to help disambiguate between related terms. Again, if this particular publisher wanted to specify that this article reported on soccer’s World Cup — as opposed to rugby’s World Cup — then they could try the following:

<meta name=”news_keywords” content=”World Cup, Qatar 2022, soccer, football”>

Use a comma to separate each phrase or group of keywords. (Commas are the only punctuation allowed in the field.) You can add up to ten phrases for a given article, and all keywords are given equal value. For instance, the first keyword is not considered a stronger signal than the tenth keyword.

Please keep in mind that we use a number of signals to determine ranking in addition to the prominence of certain keywords.