Problems with feed generation in subfolders (Maybe WPML related ?)

  • Resolved Zap Zockt

    (@zapzockt)


    3 years, 9 months ago

    Hi Chris,

    I am accepted as a GN publisher for several months now. My articles are shown in Google News, although they don’t get clicked very much yet. This is my GN Publisher link: https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBwgKMITblAswyaWqAw?hl=de&gl=DE&ceid=DE%3Ade

    Since several weeks I recognized sadly, that GN stopped showing pictures for my articles, this had worked before. Some of my older articles still show the pictures, but the newer ones do not.

    In addition to that, making everything worse, if you click on one of my articles in the News App, the shown preview consists only of my article’s short text given in the WP sidebar and there is also no “read more” nor a link to the site for the user to click/tap on. If you use the menu of the News App, you can choose to see the original page, but that should be shown directly in the app.

    If you open my Google News page on a desktop-pc, there are only the titles, no pictures and no short texts. So this isn’t ideal either. No wonder, that my CTR on GN is abysmal.

    This situation led me to install your interesting plugin. I had hopes, that I could fix the above problems with the help of your plugin.

    But here I get into another problem, as your plugin seems to be unable to recognize my articles correctly.

    It works fine with a feed like this https://zapzockt.de/feed/gn – My articles can be found there. So far so good. But that is a complete listing of all articles on my site, not all are really newsworthy, so using that feed might be a bad idea. I had this reflected in splitting my articles in different news categories and show only parts of my articles in different categories.

    But as I use WPML to handle different language versions of my articles and have different categories on my site, the things get a bit complicated. The scheme for the URLs on my site is zapzockt.de/de/article or zapzockt.de/en/article. The corresponding feeds, that your plugin is generating are unfortunately empty,
    like this one: https://zapzockt.de/de/spiele-news/feed/gn
    or this one: https://zapzockt.de/de/reviews/feed/gn
    same for the English versions: https://zapzockt.de/en/gaming-news/feed/gn
    The files are generated and accessible, but there are no articles listed in those feeds. And for sure, GN is showing “no articles” if I put this feeds in the Publisher Center.

    I already tried to edit some articles and save again, but that did not change anything.

    I assume, that your Plugin has problems with WPML sorting my articles in subfolders? Or did I make another mistake?

    I would really appreciate it very much if you could help me with this confusion. If I can help with any further information, just ask. Many thanks in advance.

    Greetings from Germany,
    Dirk

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Zap Zockt.
    • This topic was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Zap Zockt.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Hi Dirk,

    No problem, try using the ‘ugly’ url version instead of the pretty one. Usually when there is a lot going on with urls going different directions, it helps ??

    So instead of:

    https://zapzockt.de/de/spiele-news/feed/gn

    use:

    https://zapzockt.de/de/spiele-news/?feed=gn

    Let me know if that helps,

    Chris

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by christopheran.
    Thread Starter Zap Zockt

    (@zapzockt)

    Many thanks, Chris. This helped a lot. I used the “ugly” URL format and the “Feed and Crawling” Method, and now it starts making much more sense.

    There are still some minor problems with missing pictures, and a podcast plugin that inserts a very long part of bad formatted text into the article (podcast is only in the DE version available), but at least there is now more content and a few links, so interested readers can get to my page.

    I’m not sure, if this is solvable with a different scan method or how to do it better. But at least it is now a starting point, which enables me to go on and improve the User experience over time.

    Thanks again for your help and your well done plugin. I go and do a five star review now ??

    Thanks Dirk!

    Looking at a recent sample of an image that didn’t upload onto Google News, I noticed there there is an empty space in the url:

    https://zapzockt.de/wp-content/uploads/Evil-Genius-2-2021-Remake-Release-Date-Info-Trailer- Screenshots-cover.jpeg

    You might look through and see if others that didn’t upload also have a space, that might be an issue,

    Chris

    Thread Starter Zap Zockt

    (@zapzockt)

    Thanks for that hint. Makes me wonder where this space was introduced, as the original file name has no spaces?

    https://zapzockt.de/wp-content/uploads/Evil-Genius-2-2021-Remake-Release-Date-Info-Trailer-Screenshots-cover.jpeg

    Maybe something on the path from my Upload to WP via creating different versions with Shortpixel and the Cloudflare CDN is reacting strangely to my naming-scheme.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Zap Zockt.

    Ha! Okay, sorry, I’m leading you on a wild goose chase.

    I took another look and realized that for some reason my Chrome browser is introducing spaces in weird places when it translates German to English. I was just looking at the code and didn’t actually notice the wording was translated. Sorry about that!

    Another thought, Google News does ask that images be large, at least 800px on the shortest side (reference). That doesn’t seem to be a firm rule, I’ve seen them include smaller images, but just something to keep in mind,

    Chris

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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