Google SEO shift: Indian news publishers seek new strategies to host branded content

Indian digital news publishers are exploring new strategies to host branded content after Google’s March 2024 "Core Updates and New Spam Policies" banned indexing of paid content, product reviews, and coupon pages in SEO rankings. 

While publishers have stopped posting coupons completely in compliance with Google's new policy for branded content, several measures are being taken, including creating a new URL and building a separate deal platform on the website itself. 

“Google’s policy shift has dealt a severe blow to publishers, threatening the advertising-driven revenue model we rely on. We have registered a new URL. A new website with a domain similar to our original is on the way, dedicated exclusively to hosting all sponsored content,” digital head of a leading English daily told e4m. 

Many news publishers have already registered the URLs and are in the process of launching “brand websites” to sustain their advertorial business, which accounts for up to one-third of their revenue. 

A digital publisher shared,“We’ve adopted a ‘no follow, no indexing’ approach for sponsored content, and creating a separate URL for branded stories is just our first step to offset losses from the new SEO policy.”

Some publishers, such as Hindustan Times, have redesigned their user journeys and moved away from separate URLs to maintain full control over their branded content. 

“We’ve partnered with brands to offer deals and branded content directly to our registered users on our website. We have been working on this product for a while now including development of an in-house transaction tech stack,” says Puneet Jain, Chief Executive Officer - HT Digital.

Change in Google policy 

e4m on Tuesday reported how digital news publishers across India and globally are confronting an existential crisis as Google tightens its search indexing rules which further threatens to unravel the advertising-based revenue model many publishers rely on.

On 5th March of 2024, Google launched the combined Core Update and Spam Policies, the longest and biggest core update in its history. With these updates, which took 52 days and finished on April 19th, Google significantly reduced the rankings of websites it determined were more focused on search engine optimization than delivering genuine value to human readers. 

Following this, Search visibility of the world’s top digital news publishers such as Forbes, Wall Street Journal and CNN has fallen dramatically in recent months. Industry leaders say, “News publishers were directed to remove all paid content. Those who didn’t comply, found their content removed by Google.”

Several Indian news publishers too believed to have witnessed a 25-30 per cent decline in traffic over the past six months due to these updates. That lost traffic to news publishers is cumulatively worth at least $7.5 million globally, according to the search visibility analytics firm Sistrix. 

This blow came at a time when publishers are already battling a drop in traffic due to AI-overviews provided by the search engines. 

A Google spokesperson, however, claimed, “The March 2024 core update and our new spam policies were part of our ongoing work to address the issue of spam and deliver a great Search experience. Our policy is designed to ensure that users coming to a site from Search receive the content they expect. This update to the policy has helped surface the most useful search results and ensure that all sites have an equal opportunity to rank based on the quality of their content. We continue to work with publishers to enable audience growth across all key areas. The GNI Indian Languages Program has supported 500+ publishers in nine languages over two years where they have seen a 32% increase in page views and a 39% increase in digital ad revenue.”