How to seem newsy (even if you’re not)

One of the characteristics of things like Google News and Flipboard is that they focus on new, current information to decide what to show in their feeds.

If you already have a news-based site, this won’t be an issue.

However, my main site focuses on creating evergreen content, so we don’t appear to be as current or newsworthy as other sites.

Here’s how we get around that.

To do this, you basically need to create a version of your content that has slightly different information like a new title, image, and/or description.

You can do this 2 ways.

duplicate content

You can take an existing post, duplicate it, update the title, image, description, etc. But if don’t want Google to see this as duplicate content to your original post, you’ll want to put the canonical link in the new post that points to the original.

That way Google knows to only index the first one, but you can use the second one in all of the news-based ways.

Use POST POLISH

Post Polish is software that allows you to add a link from your site, change the meta data information, and then it creates a short link you can use to share.

The short link will show the new title/image/description, but when people click on the link, it’ll redirect it to your original article.

share your new links

Instead of using your regular URLs, you’ll now use the new URLs wherever you need to seem more current and newsworthy.

One bonus of using Post Polish is that it also creates an RSS feed of these new links which is perfect for submitting to things like Google News which wants a specific feed with only your newest stuff.