Working News Sitemap Generator For Google News (2015)

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.

This will help you to correctly install the plugin

1. Upload news-sitemap-generator-2014 directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. 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
4. Publish a test post

No questions yet – send questions to [email protected]

If you need support, please go to our new product support forums at https://forums.webmaster.net/#product-support-forums.66

1. 

   Add Publication Name and Language Manually

1.03

• Added Stock Ticker

1.02

• Added Publication Name, Publication Language

1.0

• First Re-Release: Usability Improvements