If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ve noticed the sweeping design changes Google is making to its many services. The service that has received the most attention is its social division, which now houses Google News and as such, the service has received a few changes to make it easier for sites to have their articles picked up by the news aggregator.

The major change is the addition of the “standout” tag that can be embedded into the header of any story so that the story is flagged as top content for the publisher. There are measures in place to avoid the abuse of the standout tag, but the basics of how it works is pretty ingenious and should help improve the stories Google pulls in for its front page news.

How Standout Tag Works

If an editor feels a piece has important reporting or exceptional investigative work that would appeal to a broader audience, the standout tag can be added to the header. This bit of code, the rel=”standout” piece to be exact, informs Google that the story should be featured on Google News under the featured label and will hopefully expose the millions of readers of Google News to quality journalism.

Of course not every outlet has the best interests of readers at heart, so Google is taking measures to prevent abuse of this new feature. News organizations may only tag their own content up to seven times a week before Google takes action, which could be featuring the content as normal and ignoring the standout tag, or outright ignoring the publications articles all together. No online news outlet wants this to happen as a blacklist from Google could result in a severe downward spiral in traffic, so Google expects outlets to maintain a fair use policy for themselves to keep this from happening.

The real beauty of the way the standout tag works is that while your own organization may have a seven times a week limit, if you experience quality journalism from another site and want to relate that information to Google, linking to the site using the standout tag in the HTML will have a positive outcome for that site’s content. The feature is very similar to the recently unveiled +1 button that users can click to say they approve of content. Adding rel=”standout” to any link that you truly appreciate is like a vote of confidence for the site to Google.

The new algorithm seems to be in place as a means to help smaller publications whose articles are often picked up by larger sites like The Washington Post or The New York Times. Often Google News offers these publications’ summary of a story that was broken by a smaller news outlet, instead of getting it directly from the source. With the rel=”standout” tag in hand, these larger publications now have the power to make the little guy just as relevant as themselves in the larger scheme of online news reporting.

Official Announcement Of Standout Feature