Problem with Google News Sitemap File

[anand84]

We have a website that we are looking to submit into Google News. One of the technical requirements was to have a News Sitemap XML file submitted to the Google Webmaster tools.

Since the website is built on a Wordpress platform, I was able to find a plugin to do that and now actually have a Google News Sitemap generated which displays correctly.

However, when it is added to the webmaster tools, the sitemap does not seem to be recognized.

This is apparently more of a bug with the software than a problem at my end. This is because while the default RSS feed for wordpress websites (www.example.com/feed) is recognized for one website, the same is not recognized as a sitemap for the other.

So, I would like to know how if our submission will be affected because of this. There is nothing I can about it since it seems to be out of my control.

[anand84]

I just ran the XML in an XML Validator website, and I got this error:

Result of Validating: http://example.com/google-news-sitemap.xml
Error: Object # has no method 'load'

I just checked with the News sitemaps protocol at the Google News website here [google.com] and it doesn't seem to have any 'load' method either. Any idea why Google WMT is not accepting the sitemap?

[Andem]

AFAIK, you don't require a news sitemap. Once your site is submitted, Google News should start picking up your stories. I don't know if this is legacy-only behaviour, though.

[anand84]

I think for that you need to have those 3 digits on your URL link.