Multiple subdomain sitemap-xmls

Hi there kind experts,

Our magazine YesICannes.com is published in English and in French. I easily create the French version thanks to Polylang, and I’m very satisfied with it.

The English version reports are indexed in GoogleNews and Google just accepted to index the French reports in Google Actualités, the French version of GoogleNews.

I use News SEO plugin, a premium plugin created by Yoast for Google Publishers, that you can use only when accepted in GoogleNews.

In Google Search Console, there is a “News” part that needs to be provided with “special” News XML sitemaps for its bots to extract the reports published every day in both language.

I can get a News XML sitemap in English, defined as the default language, (we began by publishing in english) but I need to provide Google’s Search Console with a News XML sitemap for the French articles.

The issue is that Yoast’s News SEO plugin only provides a News XML sitemap for the defaut laguage, which includes both versions of the articles, english and french. This is currently disturbing the indexation of the “French version” articles by Google bots and generates dozens of crawling errors.

It is crucial that I can get a separate News XML sitemap for each language, as, for now, our french articles don’t show in Google Actualités.

I have contacted Yoast’s support and here’s their answer (!):

Unfortunately, generating different sitemaps for different languages isn’t possible using Polylang plugin. Our plugin create separate sitemaps only with the WPML plugin.
However, if you’d like to generate different sitemaps for different languages, you’ll need to contact the Polylang plugin developer for assistance. So, they can modify their plugin to add compatibility with our plugins.

The problem is that the Polylang author doesn’t answer… like nobody does on support forums in France… So do I ask the support in English.

Would one of you experts, please be so kind as to help me on the issue of getting a single News XML sitemap for each version of my magazine?

Many thanks in advance

Alain

YesICannes.com english version: yesicannes.com
YesICannes.com english version: yesicannes.com/fr