Starting in June, Google began testing an article carousel in some journalist knowledge panels.
(Photo Credit: Blog.Google)
Google’s explanation for the update includes, “With so many complex, important stories unfolding daily, people not only rely on specific publishers for the latest news, but also increasingly turn to trusted individual journalists, authors and experts.” Learn more from Google here.
This aligns with Google’s push to showcase expert, authoritative, and trustworthy content. This is commonly referred to as E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) in the SEO community. Google wants to surface trustworthy content that is written by an authoritative journalist and/or experts in a certain field.
How to Get an Article Carousel in Your Journalist Knowledge Panel
While this is still a limited beta, here are a few ways you can optimize for the articles carousel:
1. Add Structured Data
Make sure to add structured data to your articles and include the author.
Pro Tip: Include the author’s bio page and social profiles.
Here is a NewsArticle schema example:
<script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "NewsArticle", "mainEntityOfPage": { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "" }, "headline": "Article headline", "image": "The Absolute URL of the main image", "datePublished":"The date and time the article was first published, in ISO 8601 format", "dateModified":"The date and time the article was most recently modified, in ISO 8601 format", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "First Last", "url": "The Absolute URL of the journalist's bio page", "image": "The Absolute URL of the journalist's image", "sameAs": ["Their Twitter URL","Their Facebook URL","Their Instagram URL","Their LinkedIn URL","Any other relevant social profiles or web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity like a Wikipedia page"] }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "News Publication's Name", "logo": { "@type": "ImageObject", "url": "The Absolute URL of the logo. The logo should fit in a 60x600px rectangle, and either be exactly 60px high (preferred), or exactly 600px wide." } } } </script>
2. Have a Journalist Bio Page
The journalist should have their own bio page.
These bio pages ideally should:
- Be internally linked from their articles
- Describe the journalist’s credentials and expertise
- Link to their recent and most popular articles
- Link to their social profiles
- Include an image
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