Our publication was accepted into google news on November 11th. In the acceptance email, we were told that our articles must have at least three digits in the URL in order to be indexed by google (which ours do not), or they could "alternatively" be notified via a sitemap.
So, we created a sitemap instead. Now we get this sitemap error for the past month:
"Unknown news site Your Sitemap is on a site
that is not in the Google News database. Google News can only accept
Sitemaps from sites that we crawl. If your site is crawled by Google
News, please check that the URL of your Sitemap agrees with the URLs of
your articles as they appear on Google News, including any leading
"www". If you would like to request inclusion of your site in Google
News, please contact the Google News support team."
However, we were told that we were in the google news database and also, just recently we published an article that happened to have the date in the url (e.g., 1994), and the article was included in the Google News results, bringing us good hits.
But, that is the only URL that has been included. What is going on and how can we get all of our articles indexed?
I checked the link you sent me, and according to the one article we have had published, the publication name is "Student Pulse" -- I don't see anywhere for that in the news sitemap though.
Well, you will have to put the publication name as well in the news sitemap. It's an obligatory tag. See the reference below to better understand news sitemaps.
OK, I have fixed the sitemap, but I am still getting the same error message:
Unknown news site
Your Sitemap is on a site
that is not in the Google News database. Google News can only accept
Sitemaps from sites that we crawl. If your site is crawled by Google
News, please check that the URL of your Sitemap agrees with the URLs of
your articles as they appear on Google News, including any leading
"www". If you would like to request inclusion of your site in Google
News, please contact the Google News support team.
The error may disappear eventually without doing anything , but you may also want to verify both the www and non-www version of your website with Webmaster Tools. I don't know which version was accepted in Google News, but one of them shouldn't have the error message; should accept the news sitemap without issue.
Feed
Not showing up in Google News, sitemap not working
