Yesterday Google News Stacie Chan and Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller hosted a Google News Publisher hangout on Google+, which was filled with great information.

One question that many Google News publishers do not know, which I’ve heard before but personally do not practice myself, is that the title tag and your headline (H1) should be consistent and the same. If you do not have the same title and H1 tag, it can confuse Google News and give it a hard time understanding what your article/story is about.

With web search SEO, it is often good to slightly change up the title tag and H1 so you can rank for slight variations but maybe not for Google News SEO.

The question was asked by Jane Sanderson:

Stacie Chan from Google responded:

Here is the video where she answered this about 46 minutes into the hangout:

Forum discussion at Google+.