Description
I looked for a plugin the other day to generate a proper Google News sitemap. Unfortunately, most of them were either not working, premium plugins or too bloated.
After looking for a good while and testing a handful of plugins, I set out to make a plugin that is compatible with recent Google News additions, including the possibility to specify many parameters manually.
I hope to maintain this plugin throughout 2014 and 2015 and add a few more features. If there are any bugs please report them so they can be fixed with the next release.
Some of the new features
- Provide publication name manually – if you don’t want it to be your Homepage name
- Provide site language using Google’s language codes
- Provide related stock tickers manually
- Rather than excluding categories, this plugin allows you to include categories only
Why You Should Include Only A Few Categories
Google is very picky about what sites they include. If you create a sitemap that is fetching content from your entire site, you won’t get accepted.
It is a far better idea to create a “News” and “Opinion Piece” category
What features will you add in the next version
Next on the list are additional genres: Opinion Piece, Op/Ed and other genres accepted by Google.
How do I avoid my blog from dropping out of Google News
For more info, check out the following article:
- [Avoiding Google News Pitfalls] (https://www.webmaster.net/one-surefire-way-of-blocking-your-news-posts-from-getting-indexed-into-google-news-from-your-wp-blog/).
- Google News Sitemap Guidelines.
Screenshots
Installation
This will help you to correctly install the plugin
- Upload
news-sitemap-generator-2014
directory to the/wp-content/plugins/
directory - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Move the file “google-news-sitemap.xml” to the root directory e.g. public_html and open a SSH terminal. CD into the directory and run chown nobody:nobody google-news-sitemap.xml where nobodoy MAY have to be replaced with your Apache username on certain machines
- Publish a test post
FAQ
No questions yet – send questions to contact@webmaster.net
If you need support, please go to our new product support forums at https://forums.webmaster.net/#product-support-forums.66
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“Working News Sitemap Generator For Google News (2015)” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
ContributorsTranslate “Working News Sitemap Generator For Google News (2015)” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.03
- Added Stock Ticker
1.02
- Added Publication Name, Publication Language
1.0
- First Re-Release: Usability Improvements