Live Blogs

A live blog reports on the unfolding of events in real-time. Rather than writing a conventional article after an event, live bloggers attempt to capture the experience on the spot, often using multimedia such as photos, videos, and sound clips. This reporting style has gained popularity with today’s audiences, who frequently seek instant and engaging content they can interact with while it is still happening.

Live blogs appear like regular news articles but show the latest updates in reverse chronological order with the timestamp of the latest post, as shown below

Source

The advantage of live blogs for publishers is that they appear in the Top Stories section of Google News with a red “Live” badge (if you have been approved after applying for the label) on the top-left corner of the news thumbnail, within the top stories carousel. This makes the news stand out, opening the doors for increased traffic potential.

Publishers can inform a search engine that the content they’re posting is a live blog, and not a regular article, by using liveblog structured data or markup in their HTML source code. In fact, it is the use of LiveBlogPosting structured data that could result in the red “Live” tag appearing on the top-left or bottom-left corner of the thumbnail.

4.6.2 Do Live Blogs Matter to SEO?

Yes, they do. What makes live blogs distinct from other kinds of content is the fact that they are updated very frequently. In the case of fast-moving topics such as sports fixtures, the content on a live blog may be updated as frequently as every few minutes.