Google News Doesn’t Support The Standout Meta Tag and Editors’ Pick Any Longer

Arpatech Jul 19, 2019

With the unveiling of the new AI-powered Google News a few days ago, Google has drawn support for the standout meta tag and the Editors’ Pick section.

As part of the new Google News, support for Editors’ Picks feeds & the standout meta tag has ended, with more to share on other ways publishers can enhance discernibility in the near future.

There is clearly no reason to continue to do so, as far as those publishers that use these features are concerned. It is also built into the Yoast SEO plugin, and it’s believed that Yoast will be eliminating those features as well.

Launched in September 2011, the standout meta tag came as a way to allow news publishers to highlight articles that are believed to stand above and beyond the rest. Their use was confined to seven times in a seven-day period, so publishers learned to use them frugally.

The Editors’ Pick also launched in 2011, in August, letting publishers who were comprised in this hand-curated system define which stories should be included in that list. This comes just a few months after Google also dropped support for the meta keywords new tag.

Both of these features are not supported in the new version of Google News anymore.