WP News Plugins

Google News XSL Sitemap (Version 2.7.6)

The XML/XSL Google News Sitemap enables Google-bot News to find all of the latest articles on your site published over the past 48 hours, and the WordPress Premium Google News Plugin creates the most customizable feature-rich XML News Sitemap available. With the built-in Google News XML/XSL Sitemap Generator, which corrects the built-in WordPress timezone flaw, Google-bot News will quickly find your articles in a matter of minutes, not hours!

The well-known Google Sitemap Generator can’t be used to create a News Sitemap, “as it would include URLs that don’t correspond to specific news articles,” according to Google. While there are a number of third-party tools that can help you generate a Google News Sitemap, none are more comprehensive and give you more control over content than the XML Sitemap Generator included in the WordPress Premium Google News Plugin.

Due to the number of requests we have received from our publisher client community, we have revamped our XML Google News Sitemap Generator to include XSL stylesheets that enable you to view the contents of your news sitemap without compromising visibility with Google-bot news. Now, you can see exactly what is in your sitemap via the shortcut created on your WordPress Admin toolbar.

As required by Google News guidelines, the XML Sitemap Generator removes articles more than 48 hours old and includes all content tags, which you control and customize through either global site settings, individually on each post or a combination of both. The generated New Sitemap comes complete with all the Google News compliant tags, including, the article tags, which allow you to characterize your site to Google News readers the way you want.

Smart Ping Google News Functionality

With Smart Ping Google News capabilities, a function that fired upon publishing a story and generating a revised sitemap, publishers can feel secure making frequent updates and article revisions if needed. Not many publishers know it, but multiple revisions to articles indexed in Google News can get you labeled a spammer, and greatly reduce traffic referred to your site from Google News. Unfortunately, WordPress isn’t optimized to account for this trap, but we got it covered.

If you already have a solution to this problem, then there is no problem, because a simple check of a box can disable this feature!

Complete Control & Webmaster Tools Integration

Upon updating or publishing a new story, the WordPress Premium Google News Plugin will rewrite the Google News sitemap and send the source contents to your public root for viewing by those with FTP access. With such transparency, you can see exactly how your articles are being characterized by Google News. Here is an example of the source from the above styled Google News sitemap.

Google News XML Sitemap Source Code (Version 2.7.6)

And here is the remainder of the sitemap, complete with the XML stock ticker tags and even images, the latter of which is helpful but not required.

Google says “You’re encouraged to update your News Sitemap continually with fresh articles as they’re published” and, because “Google News crawls News Sitemaps as often as it crawls the rest of your site,” we have created an easy-to-use Sitemap submission button on the plugin dashboard that opens a new tab to Webmaster Tools, so you seemingly never have to leave your WordPress dashboard. This feature is also available for the Editors’ Picks RSS Feeds, and you will never be directed away. Our “Submit Sitemap To Google Webmaster Tools” admin menu will provide easy step-by-step instructions.

Simply submit the default path: http://(www/non-www).yoursite.com/news-sitemap.xml