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I have a site that was migrated a week ago from Movable Type 4 to WordPress and ever since then, the posts are not getting indexed into Google News. We used the same meta key that we used on MT4 and we did not change the domain name in the migration. We did, obviously, change to pointer to our multi-site WP installation on a new server.

We are using the Yoast plugin for all of our sites on the new WP server. Another site that was migrated shortly before this one is being successfully scooped up by Google. I removed any static sitemap files that might have been kicking around (I did that today) since the one site that is in Google news has no static sitemaps. Is it possible Google found a conflict between the static sitemap that was brought over on the migration and Yoast plugin. I get an error in Google webmaster tools that it looks like my Yoast sitemap is an html file. But I don't have control over it do I? And it's identical to the one that works.

This one works and is indexed by Google News

This one doesn't work and isn't indexed, but it used to be when it was in Movable Type.

Anyway ideas on what I can try next?

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In order to be indexed by google news you need a unique permalink structure containing a unique number. You seem to have a permalink structure of %postname% that doesn't contain a number.

You could change your permalinks for example to %post_id%/%postname% or %post_id%-%postname% in order to comply with google news requirements.

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  • I asked about this point and apparently the site in question was allowed a different permalink structure because we've been with Google News for so long. In other words, we were "grandfathered" into our category/postname structure. But good point. – Lynn Oct 16 '12 at 17:05
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This really doesn't have much to do with Wordpress or Yoast.

Check the docs at Google News and see the requirements for what they consider to be a "news" site and how to submit a news sitemap, which is different than an overall xml sitemap.

Sounds like your site got knocked out of GNews because you're not following Google's requirements for a news site, i.e. a news sitemap, a certain style of URL and an "OK" from Google to be indexed for news.

You may need to change your Wordpress URL permalink scheme to fit into what Google wants for a news site, if they accept the site for news.

Difference between Google News and Google Search Sitemaps - Google Groups

and

Google News Forum Publisher FAQ - Google News (publishers) Help

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  • This site has been with Google News for years. the main thing that changed was now Yoast creates some sort of "dynamic" news-sitemap for us instead of MT. Yoast doesn't seem to be generating one though. Yet, in the other site that we migrated in the same way, they are getting into News just fine and I don't see their news-sitemap.xml generating either. I just need to find a way to dynamically create a news sitemap for this site. Even if I have to go outside of Yoast. – Lynn Oct 16 '12 at 17:58
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It looks like it's a Yoast issue. For some reason the sitemap for each one is missing some markup that is dynamically generated by Yoast. The reason why one is getting indexed over the other is because Google has crawled the site itself given the fact it had numerics in the urls (most likely).

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My problem was all post were getting the <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" /> meta tag.

Solution:

  1. Login as admin
  2. Goto Reading settings page from settings->reading "wp-admin/options-reading.php"
  3. Unchecked Search Engine Visibility
  4. Save Changes
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