Yesterday in the hangout where John Mueller felt the Penguin 3.0 roll out was complete, but it wasn't, John had a special guest from the Google News team, Stacie.
Stacie is the Google rep in the Google News forum, we've quoted her here dozens of times. She answered a ton of specific Google News related questions in the Google Hangout on Google+.
She said in the hangout that being accepted into Google News as a publisher "is a signal that I am sure the search algorithm uses." Why? Because Google humans review each publisher to make sure it meets the quality guidelines, so it would make sense for it to be a ranking signal. Stacie said this at 40 minutes and 21 seconds into the video.
But then I had to follow up and confirm this with John, who has more access to the search algorithm that Stacie. I asked John to clarify what Stacie said and he did at 42 minutes and 39 seconds:
He said it is mostly around how quickly Google indexes pages but not about a quality signal for ranking. He said it is something they probably treat separately but I am not sure if John was confident with that answer. He then added there is likely a correlation between quality sites being approved in Google News and the algorithm liking.
However, both didn’t seem confident in answering how Google News may or may not impact the normal web search algorithm.
Forum discussion at Google+.
