News Site based on wordpress have a challenge to create a Sitemap which is compatible with Google News. Learn how this can be quickly overcome using a simple plugin.
Requirements for Google News Sitemap
Google News aggregates data from all news based sites and displays on its News Search Results. For aggregating data from by Google, it requires News based sites to generate a Sitemap crafted specially for Google News and other News based Search Engines.
Here are the requirements for a proper Sitemap accepted by Google News:
- The site must be verified in Google Webmasters
- Permalinks shoud not have any Session Ids in them
- Sitemap should have URLs from last 3 days
- Each URL should have a timestamp / article publication date
- Maximum links allowed in Sitemap is 1000. For large sites, the sitemap should be broken into multiple ones and managed via a Sitemap Index File.
Google News Sitemap Generator Plugin
This requirement seems very difficult to generate manually. However there is a nice Wordpress Plugin called Google News Sitemap Generator which takes care of the whole Sitemap generation process with just a button click.
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Install the plugin Google News Sitemap Generator and activate it.
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Move the file google-news-sitemap.xml to teh root directory of your site. Make sure the sitemap file is writable (CHMOD to 777)
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Now everytime you Save/Edit/Publish a post, the sitemap gets rebuild.
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Submit your Site to Google News
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