If your news organization breaks a big story, or publishes an extraordinary work of journalism, you can indicate this by using the standout tag. When determining whether to use this tag for your own article, consider whether that article meets the following criteria:
- Your article is an original source for the story.
- Your organization invested significant resources in reporting or producing the article.
- The article deserves special recognition.
- You haven't used standout on your own articles more than seven times in the past calendar week.
In addition, we strongly recommend citing standout articles from other publishers when your own article draws from that standout piece of journalism. When determining whether to use this tag to cite the work of others, consider the following criteria:
- The publisher's article was the original source for the story you are now reporting.
- The original source invested significant resources in reporting or producing the article.
- You know that the original article deserves special recognition.
If a piece draws on multiple pieces of standout work, you can use the standout tag multiple times in the header of the article. Also, citing standout articles from other publishers does not count against the limit of seven self-citations per calendar week.
Using the standout tag
You can tag an article as standout by using a link tag or meta tag in the
section of a given page's HTML. For example, if you wanted to highlight an exclusive, breaking story from The Example Times, you would implement the following code on that story's page:<head>
...
<link rel="standout"
href="http://www.example.com/breaking_exclusive_story_2314"/>
</head>
Or, you could use a meta tag:
<head>
...
<meta name="standout"
content="http://www.example.com/breaking_exclusive_story_2314"/>
</head>
When the href URL points to itself, we will interpret the tag as a self-citation. When the href URL points to another article page, we will interpret the tag as pointing to an external source -- in other words, as an out-citation.
Please note, that if we find sites abusing the standout tag, we may, at our discretion, either ignore that site's tags or remove the site from Google News.