News Capsules - How to Use Them, and Why

The News Capsule is something that's easily added to your Hub -it takes about 20 seconds to add and customize-that will add value in search engines' eyes to your Hubs.

When in Edit mode, you can add a News Capsule by clicking the link in the "Add More Stuff" box to the upper-right. Then click on the EDIT button and pare down the "News keywords" to just those words that you want to find related to your topic. Press the Preview button and any news items with that topic will show up.

What's the value? In Google's eyes:

• You have more content on the page; i.e. it has more informational value. There is value in the link to relevant information, and in the short excerpt that often accompanies the link.
• You've included important keywords and related keywords (in the link and excerpt) that can broaden the scope of what your Hub covers.
• The news will be continually refreshed, so that when Google visits your site to see if there are changes, most likely there will be. Google rewards continually-refreshed pages over stale ones. (Another reason to encourage comments from visitors)

What happens when you get irrelevant news items?

You can add a "negative keyword" by adding a hyphen, without a space, and the word you want to exclude, if you don't want your news results "polluted" with irrelevant results. If, for example, you want news items about the city of Paris, but don't want results about Paris Hilton, you should type as your news keywords:

paris -hilton