Using Google's <Standout> Tag to Recognize Exceptional Content

I came across a mention of the <standout> tag while browsing through the Drupal modules feed this morning, where I saw the beginnings of a new module, standout. I was curious, so I checked the links provided on the module's page.

I previously hadn't known that Google made this available.

Essentially, by highlighting content that you feel is significant, you could potentially increase your ranking in Google's News results.

Here is how it works from Google's News Support Page :

When to use each metadata tag

Any particular article will typically have, at most, one type of these metadata tags.

<standout>

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 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 week.

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.

Google also has a Blog Posting describing this tag.

If you put the tag in the HTML header of one of your articles, Google News may show the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage and News Search results. The syntax for this new tag is as follows:

<link rel="standout" href=“http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html” />

So, the caveat here is DON'T ABUSE IT.