Separate News Sitemap With Yoast

Hi, yes you need to submit the News Sitemap to Search Console manually. You’ll also need to submit your site to be included as a news source to Google News, otherwise there is no point in running a news sitemap.

About robots.txt : it depends. My plugin will try to add the sitemaps to the WordPress generated dynamic robots.txt (not a static file) but that will not be visible if you have a static robots.txt file in your site root. This file is not there by default but it could have been created by another plugin or manually by a site admin.

You’ll have to check via FTP if there is such a file in your site root directory. If it is there, you’ll need to decide if you need to keep it or not. It depends on what’s in it. You can add the news sitemap address manually or decide to remove the complete file and leave it tor WordPress to handle requests.

Note that it’s not really needed to to add a news sitemap to robots.txt because when submitting your site as news source to Google News, you will also submit your news sitemap address. Google does not check robots.txt for that info as far as I know.

Hi Ravan,

Many thanks for your detailed reply.

I have submitted it to Search Console, but can’t find where to submit it Google News. My site is already included and I’ve looked through Publisher Centre, but can’t find a section for a News Sitemap.

Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks

• This reply was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by maccas83.

Did you follow these steps https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787 ?

Note the last part under “Share your site with us”…

• This reply was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by Rolf Allard van Hagen.

Hi Ravan,

Yes indeed, the site has already been added and included in Google News, but I’m not sure how to add your news sitemap to it now. I understood that adding it would speed up the adding of each new article.

Many thanks

And you also added the news sitemap (not only the normal xml sitemap) to your Google Search Console? If there no error that sais “Unknown news site” or similar, it should be OK.