Companies crafting news content can now occupy two spots in Google’s ‘Top Stories’ carousel after the search giant rolled out a new SERPs update last week.
Google has now added a ‘for context’ link beneath the primary slot in the carousel, which is designed to provide more extensive coverage of stories and additional information for searchers when they enter a trending query.
Google believes that this makes content more relevant as users will not have to complete several searches to get the information they need.
The change will benefit publishers capable of securing a spot in the carousel as the second link will be attributed to the same source as the first.
This increases the ‘evergreen’ potential of new stories as older content is likely to be surfaced for longer periods of time.
The change was spotted by Valentin Pletzer, who shared two screenshots of the updated carousel on Twitter last week.
Google has since confirmed that it is actually a new feature and not part of a new test.
“Where we detect that a publisher has this kind of background content for a timely news story, we will add it,” a spokesperson for Google said in a statement.
While the new feature is live, it appears to be limited for the time being as a single link carousel still surfaces regularly when entering a news-related search query.
Google’s statement suggests that there is nothing specific that publishers can actually do to ensure that the ‘for content’ link appears in search.
However, using internal linking for news stories will increase the visibility of important content and make Google aware that further context does exist on a site.
The change is particularly useful for brands and marketers that are regularly producing high-quality news content as increased prominence in search is now possible.
