With the launch of the new AI-powered Google News last night, Google has pulled support for two webmaster and SEO features for Google News publishers: the standout meta tag and the Editors’ Pick section.
Google posted about this change last night on Twitter, saying:
For those publishers that use these features, there is obviously no reason to continue to do so. It is also built into the Yoast SEO plugin, and I assume Yoast will be removing those features as well. Here is a screen shot from the Yoast SEO plugin:
The standout meta tag launched in September 2011 as a way to enable news publishers to highlight articles they think stand above and beyond the rest. Their use was limited to seven times in a seven-day period, so publishers learned to use them sparingly.
The Editors’ Pick also launched in 2011, but in August. It let publishers who were included 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 no longer supported in the new version of Google News.
