I was wondering if you could help me

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Brenda Malone: Is it a different website, or are they using the same site for both?
  
  
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  Anne-Sophie Lindvold: Brenda Malone Hello! Thank you for getting back to me. It`s for the same website
  
  
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  Stockbridge Truslow: Short answer: Yeah - there is a bit of pigeonholing that can happen - for the short term anyway.
  
  Have you expanded your taxonomies in the news section of the site to broaden the categories of coverage? Or, did you just jam everything all in together? Do other areas of the site reflect that these new areas are things you`re qualified to cover and does it show the relevance to why you`d be covering these things?
  
  Google should figure it out eventually, but there are signals you can send to help it understand more quickly and accurately. Would need to know some more specifics to get much more specific here, though.
  
  
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  Anne-Sophie Lindvold: Stockbridge Truslow I can see your point in that we need to review whether our own website`s content reflects that we`re operating in a different industry to our traditional industry.
  
  We haven`t included the news story from the new industry`s publication on our own website so that might also be why Google hasn`t connected the dots.
  
  Thank you for your thorough response. It`s a really great help What specifics would you need?
  
  
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  Stockbridge Truslow: Basically, you want to have things in categories that connect the posts by their main topic subjects. Those categories tend to work best if they align with the various types of products or services that you offer.
  
  You can then use "tags" to connect posts from different categories to show that they might have some common element that crosses the categorical classifications. So... for example, you might make the "tags" for the news articles represent your target audience industries - thus making it so someone in a specific industry can see which posts - regardless of product/service category - they might be most interested in.
  
  Then again... the categories might work best as the industry audiences and tags as something else. That`s where the "I`d need something more specific" comes in. Every scenario is a little different. The approach might change a bit based upon where you are currently too. There may be effective ways to do it without shaking everything up. Or... it might really require a shakeup to get everything working right.
  
  Ultimately - you want to use links in the posts, their taxonomies, and the navigation of your site to show how all these things connect to each other - and to your brand. Getting that right - and doing it in a way that scales so you can easily expand from what you have now is important.
  
  
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  Ash Nallawalla: This happens. My employer shut down a car news and reviews site a month ago. For some years, its pages were canonicalised to a parent site, which is a leading car marketplace. The same articles also appeared on that parent site. The site that was closed used to show as a News site, but the parent site never did and still does not. We have only just started addressing this, but many other past experiences tell me that Google will pigeonhole a domain and a lot of effort is needed to shift that.
  
  
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  Anne-Sophie Lindvold: Ash Nallawalla Thank you for getting back to me, and for sharing your experience.
  
  Would you mind telling me what you have done so far to change this?
  
  
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  Ash Nallawalla: Anne-Sophie Lindvold The old domain had been submitted in Google Publisher Center, while the parent domain had not. So, even though the old domain articles were showing a canonical of the parent domain, it always did well as a News site. Today we submitted the parent domain as a news site. I noticed that the old domain had not filled out the "Google News" details, but I made sure to do so now. The old omission was probably because the earlier news site application was done about 8 years ago and did not reflect in the current Publisher Center. This happens in enterprise sites, where people come and go and don`t document things.
  
  
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  Ash Nallawalla: Next step will be to create and submit a News Sitemap.xml even though people say that is not essential. I like doing everything by the book, whether Google honours or ignores the book is of little concern. e.g. Google apparently only looks at two of the four fields in a standard sitemap.xml.
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: The last time a client expanded I made 5 new pages, wrote a news piece for the news section, rewrote the footer and the contact page to include the new salesperson and contact info, did a `splash` on the front page, updated GBP with more items, opened a social medium acc, and had the local newspaper run by the company with a photographer writing a one-page news piece. After the mention in the newspaper paper version, we got a mention in their online version as well, so I wrote a news piece about that too + linking to that article. The expansion went nicely - a lot of love from Google.
  
  
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  Anne-Sophie Lindvold: Christine Hansen Thank you for sharing your experience. I think there`s definitely some initiatives we can take from what you`re saying and include this in our own digital strategy. Really helpful!
  
  What was the time span on all of these initiatives? Did you do this over a longer a period of time or did you do it all at once?
  
  Did you see an effect on Google straight away or did it take a few days, weeks, or months to see the result?
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: Anne-Sophie Lindvold You are very welcome. Of course, activities surrounding the expansion are scalable in so many directions. The period was april and mid-may 2020. A fairly short period - one shot in a gun kind of client, however a strong life-time client today. My focus point was what I knew Google wanted, for this to work. The results were instant. Google love me