Today we take a look at Google News and the News OneBoxes for Australia. We analyse for the first time the visibility on Google News and the News OneBoxes of several news publishers and compare them. Therefore, we used the KPI Dashboard data for August from the Trisolute News Dashboard for Australia.

We are going to start with Google News. The following chart shows us a Top Five of the news publisher with the highest visibility in Google News in August. Theaustralian.com.au, abc.net.at, news.com.au, inquisitr.com and smh.com.au were the news publisher with the highest visibility during the last 31 days of August.

smh.com.au has best Google News Visibility on almost every day in August

On almost every day of August, The Sydney Morning Herald, smh.com.au had the highest visibility of all five competitors, on Google News. This news publisher was very strong on Google News and got a lot of rankings during this period of time. abc.net.au and news.com.au are following The Sydney Morning Herald. Both news publisher were better than the average and had also a good visibility on Google News, but couldn’t beat The Sydney Morning Herald. The next publisher on our list is theaustralian.com.au, with a visibility about the average of the Top Five on Google News. Inquisitr.com has the lowest figures of the Top Five but on the other hand has left publishers like yahoo.com, guardian.com and heraldsun.com.au behind for the visibility in Google News in August. The average Google News visibility figures for August are as follows: smh.com.au 12.96%, abc.net.au 10.17%, news.com.au 9.89%, theaustralian.com.au 7.23% and inquisitr.com 2.66%.

Next, our focus is on the Google News OneBoxes. Other than in the analysis for Google News, inquisitr.com is not in the Top Five and got displaced by theguardian.com.

Abc.net.au is clearly the winner, when it comes to the Google News OneBoxes in August

The analysis of the Google News Boxes shows us a different picture than the one before.  Abc.net.au is clearly the winner, when it comes to the Google News Boxes in August. Only on two days the news publisher got beaten by its competitors. Smh.com.u comes on second place, with still a very good visibility in the Google News Boxes. Both news publishers could win a lot of News Boxes in August. Moreover, news.com.au was under the Top3 and theguardian.com as well as theaustralian.com.au were both under the average of the Top Five. If we look at the visibility figures for the Google News OneBox in Australia for the full month the picture is as follows: abc.net.au has a News Box visibility of 27.2% (even internationally a quite strong figure), smh.com.au got 20.98%, and news.com.au is on third place with 15.89%. On fourth place we found theguardian.com with 8.4% and fifth is theaustralian.com with 7.05%

After we analysed Google News and the News OneBoxes, we take a closer look at the publishing/Google News indexing rate of the news publishers throughout August.

Clear differences in the publication activity of australian publishers

When it comes to the “publishing rate” (we measure the indexed articles at Google News), news.com.au is probably the most active competitor. At some point they had results of almost 400 articles per day. As we can see in our chart The Sydney Morning Herald was the competitor with lowest figures when it comes to the publishing rate. The highest rate was about 150 articles per day. The other three competitors, theaustralian.com.au, dailytelegraph.com.au and abc.net.au are along average. This information is interesting, because The Sydney Morning Herald had much less articles than news.com.au, but performed much better on Google News and the News Boxes. So they did a great job at Google News SEO by optimizing their articles for Google News and the News Boxes and they are very efficient.

Finally, we also analysed the topic coverage of all five news publishers. As the base for that we collect the keywords (topics and related) from Google News front-page and categories every 15 min and calculate how many topics the publishers cover with their articles. All five competitors (abc.net.au, dailytelegraph.com.au, news.com.au, smh.com.au and theaustralian.com.au) performed very well. The average of all was more than 50 percent, which is very good.  Two news publishers were really good and on a higher level than the others, for example news.com.au. This news publisher had a high level of 72.79 percent and in average they were better than the others. The topic coverage curve for news.com.au in August looks like this.

High topic coverage rate of several Australian publishers with respect to Google News Topics and Google News Related keywords

In the example, news.com.au had a topic coverage of 60.36 percent on the 15^th of august. The curve shows clearly that news.com.au never gets lower that 50 percent. Behind news.com.au, dailytelegraph.com.au had also a very good topic coverage. Like we said the others are all very good as well but news.com.au and dailytelegraph.com.au are a bit better.

To sum it up, smh.com.au performed really well on Google News and the News Boxes during August. They could get a lot of rankings on Google News and won a lot of News Boxes. At the News Boxes they got beaten only by abc.net.au, but performed still very strong.  As it was shown in our analysis, The Sydney Morning Herald had a relatively low publishing rate. That is beside the general ranking of the publishers another interesting outcome from our analysis. With less articles they beat their competitors, and still covered most of the important topics. Therefore, they did a great News SEO job on Google News and the News Boxes. Abc.net.au did also a great job. The news publisher performed very well on Google News and even better at the News Boxes. They had an average publishing rate and also covered the most important topics. News.com.au is a big news publisher which published almost 400 articles per day. That is around three times more than The Sydney Morning Herald. But still, they couldn’t reach that much rankings or News Boxes like The Sydney Morning Herald. Nevertheless, news.com.au also performed quite well. They just got beaten by the other two competitors. The other news publisher (theaustralian.com.au, inquisitr.com, dailytelegraph.com.au, theguardian.com) performed quite okay but can’t compete with the other three in August.