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May 20, 2013

BBC beats Mail Online and Guardian in top ten list of UK news websites to appear on Google news results

By William Turvill

The BBC website is more likely to show up in a Google news results search than any other UK news site, according to new figures.

The research shows that the Guardian and Mail Online websites are the second and third most likely, while the Telegraph (fourth) and Independent (eighth) sites also feature in the top ten.

The Huffington Post (fifth), Yahoo (sixth), the India Times (seventh), Wall Street Journal (ninth) and Reuters (tenth) make up the rest of the top ten.

The research, which was carried out by Searchmetrics in April, involved searching “several million” key words on Google.co.uk and analysing which sites appeared in news results most frequently.

The top ten is ranked by the number of times a site showed up in news results for the searched words. Here is the table:

  1. – bbc.co.uk, 33,384
  2. – guardian.co.uk, 30,691
  3. – dailymail.co.uk, 19,315
  4. – telegraph.co.uk, 19,211
  5. – huffingtonpost.com, 12,790
  6. – yahoo.com, 11,347
  7. – indiatimes.com, 10,764
  8. – independent.co.uk , 9,863
  9. – wsj.com, 7,543
  10. – reuters.com, 7,037

A separate study by Searchmetrics in the United States found that news results shown by Google grew by 70 per cent in 2012 and that the number of sources grew by 15 per cent in the year.

Marcus Tober, of Searchmetrics, said: “While it isn’t surprising that the BBC, with its wide range of content, should top our study, our data indicates that there are increasing opportunities for smaller sites to appear in news results as Google is now showing more content from a wider range of sources.  

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“Getting into news results is even more valuable for publishers because they always appear on the first page and are positioned near the top.”
 
On the fact that sites such as the India Times and Wall Street Journal appeared, he added: “Search  is truly global, with sites such as IndiaTimes.com increasingly visible in UK results.

“And the Guardian, while it is primarily known as a UK site, also appears in the top ten in a recent study we carried out on US Google.com searches.”

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