GN feed not validated by W3C + not showing in google news

Hi Tidus,

I checked and Google is able to fetch your rss feed okay. If you are able to look in your logs, you should see a useragent that includes “Feedfetcher-Google” accessing the feed.

You can also tell it’s being fetched by looking at the very bottom of the feed. It will indicate when Feedfetcher-Google last crawled a GN Publisher created feed on your site.

That said, if you want to display fewer article on the feed, GN Publisher respects the ‘Syndication feeds show the most recent’ setting in your WP admin – it’s under ‘settings’ > ‘reading’.

You might try setting it to something like 5. Again though, that’s not required, W3C might be timing out, but Google’s crawler isn’t.

So… the question is, why is your Publication not working?

I copied your feed and entered it into the RSS Validator manually: https://validator.w3.org/feed/#validate_by_input

It validate, but there are a number of warnings. The one that applies here is:

– Invalid HTML: Unexpected end tag (p). Ignored.

While the validator ignores that, the Publisher Center chokes on it. That has to be fixed for your Publication to work.

Looking at your feed, the problem seems to start here:

<p style="text-align: justify;"><div class="su-button-center"><a href="https://www.(removed).fr/lyon-l295/lyon-city-card-tout-lyon-en-une-seule-carte-t39757/?partner_id=BO84AWZ" class="su-button su-button-style-flat" style="color:#FFFFFF;background-color:#5eca0c;border-color:#4ca20a;border-radius:12px;-moz-border-radius:12px;-webkit-border-radius:12px" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"><span style="color:#FFFFFF;padding:0px 30px;font-size:22px;line-height:44px;border-color:#8fda55;border-radius:12px;-moz-border-radius:12px;-webkit-border-radius:12px;text-shadow:none;-moz-text-shadow:none;-webkit-text-shadow:none"> J&rsquo;achète le Lyon City Card maintenant! <small style="padding-bottom:9px;color:#FFFFFF">Je souhaite visiter Lyon grace au pass</small></span></a></div>
<p style="text-align: justify;"></div></div>

You’ll see there are two starting <p tags – but they are never closed. Whatever plugin or function in your theme is adding that section doesn’t have the proper coding.

The Publisher Center breaks every time that the p tags are incorrect. That’s an absolute – however, there are other reasons the Publisher Center might not work. Fixing this will probably get things working, but I’m also dealing with Google concerning a bug (I think) in the Publisher Center where the feed is perfect and with some publishers, the Publication continues to display ‘no items to show’. That’s under investigation. If you are affected by that issue… well, I’m working on it… but even if this bug is fixed, the p tag issue will break things, so that’s what needs to be fixed first ??

Chris

• This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by christopheran.

Oh, and you asked about the cache – GN Publisher is designed to skip the cache so that Google News crawls the latest/freshest feed possible. A lot of publishers were struggling with Google crawling cached copies of the feed without the latest articles. That feature is built into the plugin. But again, I don’t believe that’s the problem here ??

Hi Chris,

Thanks a lot for your quick answer!

That did the job, I fixed the <p> issue (which was fine in WordPress editor, and fine everywhere else using the exact same code – so I just removed the <p> here – Still not sure what exactly happened to show like this in the feed.)

One last small thing: in the preview, I only see the post titles, and I am not sure if it’s normal (no picture or description of the article).

Thanks again for your help and have a great day!

There won’t be a description, but the images should be displayed.

I don’t see any issues with the feed or images.

If you subscribe to your Publication (the link to do that is under the ‘review and publish’ tab in the Publisher Center), and then visit your Publication, are the images displayed there?

Chris

Thanks again for your quick answer.

It seems I can’t subscribe to my publication for now, as it’s “in review” status.

Will wait till it’s done and see!

Have a great day,

Vincent

For some reason, sometimes you have to jump through some hoops to see your publication when it’s in the review status. Try putting it into ‘designer mode’ status.

The instructions for doing that are here:

https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9603948?hl=en

Under “Enable Designer Mode on your Device”

Chris

Thanks a lot!