Last week, I released the results of a survey of Google News Ranking Factors with some of the top news SEOs in the business. While there has been plenty of response regarding the Top 10 Most Important Factors, I thought it would be helpful to take a closer look at the Top Negative Factors. In my work with local news publishers, I have seen many of them doing a lot of things which hurt their rankings.

1. Duplicate Content
2. Vague, Abstract Headlines
3. No Google News Sitemap
4. Poor Quality Content
5. Blocking Googlebot Via Robots.txt
6. Poor Site Performance
7. Poor CitationRank
8. Low PageRank Domain
9. New Site
10. All Syndicated Content With The Same Titles As The Source Site