Google’s “In-Depth Article” feature showcases quality content
Users often turn to Google to answer a quick question, but research suggests that up to 10% of users’ daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic. These users are looking for detailed information. That is why on August 6, 2013 Google introduced new search results to help users find these “in-depth articles”.
When you’re searching on Google for a person or organization name, or other broad topic, you’ll now start to find a block of search results labeled “In-depth articles”. The listings for these “In-depth articles” are typically on the bottom of the first page of Google results. These results provide high-quality content to help you learn about or explore a subject. While the feature is based on algorithmic signals, there are steps you can take as a webmaster to help Google find your high-quality, in-depth content and best present it to users in the search results.
Your Content Strategy
If you are an online newspaper who publishes content, or you are a re-publisher of syndicated content, then you should utilize the new Google “In-depth article” feature. Articles between 2000 and 5000 words seem to be best for inclusion in these results. The idea is that these articles should be the sort of content that will remain relevant for months after publication. Make sure that your content touches on every angle of the article’s topic.
These results are ranked algorithmically based on many signals that look for high-quality, in-depth content. You can help their algorithms understand your pages better by using schema article markup. Following these practices along with Google’s webmaster guidelines helps Google to better understand your website’s content, and improves the chances of it appearing in this new set of search results.
In-depth article Inclusion
The best way to be included in the Google “in-depth article” feature is to useSchema.org Article markup. In general, Google will do their best to understand the metadata you provide for your pages to better present search results to users. For this feature, it’s particularly helpful if you can implement certain aspects of the schema.org Article markup, notably the following attributes:
- headline
- alternativeHeadline
- SEO title tag
- image (note: the image must be crawlable and indexable)
- description
- datePublished
- articleBody
Authorship markup helps Google’s algorithms find and present relevant authors and experts in Google search results. For multi-part content, proper pagination markup using rel=next and rel=prev can help Google’s algorithms correctly identify the extent of those articles. In addition, it’s important that canonicalization is done correctly, with a rel=canonical pointing at either each individual page, or a “view-all” page (and not to page 1 of a multi-part series).
A logo is also a great way help users recognize the source of an article with a quick glance. As a webmaster, there are two ways you can give Google a hint about which logo to use for your website:
- Create a Google+ Page and link it to your website. Choose an official logo or icon as the default image.
- Use organization markup to specify your logo. For example:
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Organization”>
<a itemprop=”url” href=”http://www.example.com/”>Home Advance</a>
<img itemprop=”logo” src=”http://www.example.com/logo.png” />
</div>
See Google Webmaster Tools for more detailed information on how to possibly appear in the” In-depth article” results.
In Closing
Make sure that you create meaningful, original, well-researched and thorough content in your articles. You also need to make sure that your article has keyword relevance. This should put you on the road for inclusion in Google’s “in-depth articles”.
