Chapter 34 — Exercises

Work these in order; they climb from recall to real publisher judgment. You will need a live browser and, ideally, a content site you can inspect (your own, an employer's, or a client's) plus Google Search Console access if you have it. Every tool here is free. Items marked with a dagger (†) have full worked solutions in Appendix — Answers to Selected Exercises; odd-numbered items are worked there too. Attempt every item before you look.

A reminder in the spirit of the chapter: a publisher's core question is never "how do I rank this one article?" It is "which surface can this content win, how long will that last, and what happens to my business when Google changes its mind?"

A. Recall and vocabulary

Exercise 34.1 — In one sentence each, define Google News, Google Discover, and evergreen content. Then state the single most important difference between how you optimize for Search versus how you "optimize" for Discover.

Exercise 34.2 † — Explain the modern reality of Google News inclusion: do you submit or pay to get in? What does the Publisher Center actually do? Name one thing a "get into Google News" service is selling you that you already have for free.

Exercise 34.3 — Distinguish a news sitemap from an ordinary XML sitemap (Chapter 14): what does a news sitemap contain, how long do URLs stay in it, and what is its purpose?

Exercise 34.4 — Define flexible sampling and name its two flavors. In one sentence, explain what makes it not cloaking.

Exercise 34.5 — What is NewsArticle schema, and which two date fields does the chapter single out as the ones a publisher must keep truthful? Is NewsArticle schema a ranking factor?

Exercise 34.6 † — Define content syndication and canonical attribution. Then complete the sentence honestly: "A cross-domain rel=canonical is a __, not a ____."

B. Applied reasoning

Exercise 34.7 — The chapter calls Discover "the feed that giveth and taketh." Restate that phrase as a concrete rule a publisher should follow when planning a budget or a traffic forecast.

Exercise 34.8 † — Explain, in terms a newsroom editor would accept, why a strategy of "publish 40 breaking posts a day and nothing else" is fragile — and what the compounding alternative is. Use the words half-life and evergreen.

Exercise 34.9 — Google's systems assess quality partly at the site level. Explain how a large archive of decayed, once-breaking articles can hurt a publisher's good, current content, and connect it to the content-audit anchor.

Exercise 34.10 — Why does the chapter insist that author E-E-A-T "cannot be faked at scale"? Describe the mechanism (how Google corroborates an author) that makes fabrication fail.

Exercise 34.11 † — A publisher wants Googlebot to see the full text of paywalled articles so they'll rank, and plans to detect Googlebot and serve it the whole piece while showing humans a paywall — with no markup. Name the violation, and describe the sanctioned way to achieve the same goal.

Exercise 34.12 — Explain why "query deserves freshness" (QDF) means you should not chase freshness on every page. Give one query type where freshness helps and one where it is irrelevant or harmful.

Exercise 34.13 — Web Stories and AMP are often confused. Separate the two claims "AMP lost its Top Stories privilege" and "Web Stories are a dead technology," and say which is true, which is false, and why the distinction matters for a publisher deciding where to invest.

C. Diagnose the situation

For each scenario, name the most likely cause and the first move you would make. Some have more than one defensible answer — say why.

Exercise 34.14 — You publish an original, excellent guide. A national outlet republishes it verbatim by agreement. A week later, their copy ranks for the topic and yours is nowhere. Google has not penalized you — so what happened, and what are the two strongest attribution moves you could have negotiated?

Exercise 34.15 † — A subscription news site's paywalled articles are indexed but rank poorly, and a spot check shows Google only ever saw the free lead-in excerpt — the gated body was never in the HTML sent to Googlebot. Diagnose the problem and the fix.

Exercise 34.16 — A publisher's Discover traffic was enormous for two months, then dropped to near zero with no manual action and no error in Search Console. The team is frantically looking for "what broke." Reframe the situation: what is the honest diagnosis, and what is the honest response?

Exercise 34.17 † — A health publisher's evergreen articles used to rank well but slipped after a core update. The pages are technically fine. Name two non-technical dimensions (from Chapters 5, 12, and this chapter) you would investigate first.

Exercise 34.18 — A newsroom's brand-new breaking story about a developing local event isn't appearing in Top Stories, while competitors' stories are. The content is good. Name three eligibility/technical reasons (from §34.1) that could explain missing the window.

Exercise 34.19 — A site publishes thousands of AI-generated "news" posts a day to feed Discover. Individually, some pass a quick read. Diagnose the risk to the whole site, naming the relevant Google system (Chapters 6, 13).

D. On your own site (use a free tool)

Exercise 34.20 † — In Google Search Console, check whether a Discover report exists in the sidebar. If it does, record the shape of the traffic (steady vs. a few big spikes) and the single top-performing page. If it doesn't, write one sentence on what that absence means. (No fixing — just observe.)

Exercise 34.21 — Open any article's page source and search for max-image-preview. Record whether it says large, standard, or is missing. Write one sentence on what this means for your Discover image eligibility, and what you'd change if anything.

Exercise 34.22 — Sort a sample of ten of your own pages into the three buckets from §34.3: breaking, analysis/explainer, evergreen. Which bucket holds your most durable traffic? Name your single best evergreen asset and one page that has decayed and needs the Chapter 12 treatment.

Exercise 34.23 — Pick your three most important authors (or the site's main byline). For each, check: is there a real author page with a bio and credentials, and is the byline linked to it? Note one concrete E-E-A-T improvement you could make this week.

Exercise 34.24 † — If your site publishes any genuinely time-sensitive content, check whether a news sitemap exists (look for a sitemap referencing <news:publication>), and whether your articles carry clear, correct datePublished/dateModified values. If you publish no news, write one sentence explaining why a news sitemap would be the wrong thing to build.

E. Read the report / optimize the page

Exercise 34.25 † — Interpret this report excerpt.

FIGURE E.1 — "A content site's surface mix (last 6 months)"     [constructed teaching example]
  Search clicks:    1,100,000  (steady, slowly rising)
  Discover clicks:    900,000  (four single-day spikes account for ~70% of the total)
  Email/direct:        40,000
  Top Discover page:  one "surprising health myth" article — 620,000 of the Discover clicks, one week

What does the surface mix reveal about this business's fragility? Name the single biggest risk and the two things you would do first — and note which number worries you most and why.

Exercise 34.26 — Optimize the headline. Rewrite this Discover-bait title so it is compelling and accurate rather than clickbait, and explain what specifically you changed and why Discover rewards the rewrite: "Doctors HATE This One Weird Trick — You Won't Believe What It Does to Your Heart!" (Assume the underlying article is a legitimate explainer on the effect of a daily walk on cardiovascular health.)

Exercise 34.27 — Below is a fragment of NewsArticle markup. Two things are wrong or risky from the chapter's standpoint. Identify them and say why they matter.

{ "@type": "NewsArticle", "headline": "10 Foods That Melt Fat Overnight",
  "datePublished": "2021-03-02", "dateModified": "2026-05-14",
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Staff" } }

Exercise 34.28 † — You syndicate a strong original to three partners. For each partner goal below, choose the strongest realistic attribution move from §34.6 and justify it: (a) you mainly want brand reach and don't care about the ranking; (b) the search ranking for this piece is strategically critical; (c) the partner refuses to noindex or canonical anything.

F. Myths, ethics, and judgment

Exercise 34.29 — Spot the myth. A consultant tells a publisher: "Pay us \$2,000 and we'll get you into Google News, then add big images and you're guaranteed Discover traffic." Identify the two separate false claims and replace each with what the chapter says is actually true.

Exercise 34.30 † — A publisher restamps 500 old articles with today's date to make them look fresh, and buys a batch of glowing "expert reviewer" bylines for its health content to boost E-E-A-T. Evaluate both tactics on the book's ethics and evidence standards. What is the honest alternative to each?

Exercise 34.31 — A subscription publisher asks whether it should drop its paywall entirely "so Google can rank everything." Give the two-sided answer: what a paywall costs in SEO/reach terms, what flexible sampling resolves, and why the gating decision is ultimately a business judgment, not an SEO one.

G. The Strategy File (Rivertown Home Services)

Exercise 34.32 † — Rivertown's owners, Marisa and Tony Delgado, read this chapter and get excited about "becoming a publisher." Talk them down and find the real value: list two things their neglected blog should borrow from publisher thinking (§34 Strategy File) and two things it should ignore, with one sentence of reasoning each.

Exercise 34.33 — Do the chapter's Strategy-File task on your own (or a client's) site: sort a sample of content into breaking/analysis/evergreen, name your best evergreen asset and one decayed page, then answer the hard question in writing — if Google halved your organic traffic next month, what channel would keep the business alive? If the answer is "nothing," write the first sentence of the project that fixes that.

Where these go next. Keep your answers to 34.20, 34.22, 34.24, and 34.33 — they extend your running Strategy File (Appendix C's worksheet). The evergreen-vs-decayed sort you do today feeds the full content plan you assemble in Chapter 40, and the diversification question is the one Chapter 36 answers in full.