Google News can be a coveted platform. But Google needs for the aggregation a special format – News Sitemap.
Basically you can create this format in two ways with WordPress. Both solutions will be presented here. I will talk about the second example more in detail, because I believe it shows very nicely how to use content from WordPress outside your blog.
- The first way is to create a sitemap, similar to a feed in WordPress. This has several advantages for the administration in WordPress.
How to create a feed, I have in the tutorial „WordPress Feed for Drafts“ shown. You can download this solution as a plugin and simple use Google News-Sitemap. - A second possibility is to create a PHP file in the root directory and to write the latest posts into the appropriate format.
Include WordPress
To get the data from WordPress, you have to have access to wp-load.php, therefore I include it and can get it from the global variables of WordPress, for example the $wpdb database .
This means you can retrieve now all data from the database, which are relevant to the XML format of the Google News Sitemap.
The format
Google provides the following XML structure. I build the structure in the file, and fill it only with the last 20 News.
Backgrounds and tips from Google are on their document site.
http://www.domain.de/news/news1.html
2008-22-01T00:29:19+01:00
key1, key2, key3
The file
Below you’ll find a simple solution that you can surely expand. In the SQL query is the example of a defined category. This is simply the ID of the category compared (AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = 7). If all content should be drawn, then it’s suffice to delete this line.
' . "\n";
// urlset
echo '' . "\n";
// Select posts; set limit 20
$rows = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT DISTINCT ID, post_date_gmt
FROM $wpdb->posts, $wpdb->term_relationships, $wpdb->term_taxonomy
WHERE wp_term_relationships.object_id = wp_posts.id
AND post_status = 'publish'
AND post_type = 'post'
AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
AND wp_term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category'
AND wp_term_taxonomy.term_id = 7
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date_gmt DESC
LIMIT 0, 20");
// sitemap data
// set keywords !
foreach ($rows as $row) {
echo "\t" . '' . "\n";
echo "\t\t" . '';
echo get_permalink($row->ID);
echo ' ' . "\n";
echo "\t\t" . '' . "\n";
echo "\t\t" . '';
$thedate = substr($row->post_date_gmt, 0, 10);
$thetime = substr($row->post_date_gmt, 11, 20);
echo $thedate . 'T' . $thetime . 'Z';
echo ' ' . "\n";
echo "\t\t" . 'online, news ' . "\n"; // change keywords
echo "\t\t" . ' ' . "\n";
echo "\t" . ' ' . "\n";
}
// End urlset
echo ' ';
?>
In the above syntax, the unique keywords are statically assigned. If you assign tags to a blog post, then it is advisable to use it and create there. Following addition will help.
$tags = wp_get_post_tags( $row->ID, array('fields' => 'all') );
$tagcount = count($tags);
echo "\t\t" . '';
for ($i = 1; $i < $tagcount; $i++) {
echo $taglist = str_replace( "'", '', str_replace( '"', '', urldecode($tags[$i]->name) ) );
if ( $i != $tagcount-1 )
echo ', ';
}
echo ' ' . "\n";
Use this line instead
echo "\t\t" . 'online, news ' . "\n"; // change keywords
and it will assign tags automatically, seperated by a comma.
Inclusion in Google
Once you have the above syntax as a file in the root installation and successfully tested, then you only have to ask for inclusion in Google News. There is a form available. Then just wait for an answer from Google.
To see if you are indexed, you can simple search in Google News: site:domain.com.
Comments
18 responses to “Google News To Release With WordPress”
Its best to include wp-load.php instead of wp-config.php, for a few reasons, 1 of which is that wp-config.php can exist 1 level up from WP.
See the ticket here: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6933
(Note: wp-load.php is WP 2.6+)
[…] Google News To Release With WordPress […]
Thanks DD32, you are right. I use
wp-load.phpfor the help files of my upcomming theme too. Frank should fix that after holidays.This was an awesome post. I definitely agree with you and I am looking forward to reading more of your blog.
Hey Blog Expert, thanks for the compliment and happy new year!
Great post! Does anyone know how I can get the unique 3 digits into my URLs?
Hey Greg, I see you already have 3 digits into your URLs, looks like you worked it out.
Hi Alex, yes thanks a friend on DP told me how to do this 🙂 Imagine yesterday I got an email from Google… My site has been approved 🙂
Do you know how I can submit the sitemap to them?
Hello Alex, great post for me too.
I follow it but running my php file I have only three old posts of my blog.
What’s wrong?
Thank you very much
@Greg
How did you get the 3 digit unique code in to your urls without updating your permalink structure? Or did you?
@Alex,
From what I can see on the webmaster tools you can simply submit an rss feed instead of using a sitemap.xml. Why go through the trouble of creating this is their own feed from feedburner would work?
Hi Siriusbuzz to get the 3 digit id I updated my permalinks structure. I couldn’t find any other way to do this.
Is there any reason we would want to limit the sitemap to 20 items? I have looked around but I cant find a suggested/optimal number to feed Google with.
According to Google:
A News sitemap can contain no more than 1,000 URLs. If you want to include more, you can either break these into multiple sitemaps or create a Sitemap index file to manage them. Use the XML format provided in the Sitemap protocol. Your sitemap index file shouldn’t list more than 1,000 sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server isn’t overloaded by serving large files to Google News.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=74288&topic=10078
Hope that answers your question…
I also noticed that they said you shouldn’t have any news items older then 72 hours old. Actually, they said 3 days but, you get the idea. I don’t know who the heck has the ability to post 1k items in 3 days.
Where did you see this?
Once you create the php file, how do you then access it as an XML file?
[…] by Google in the Getting Started section. If you are running a WordPress site, WP Engineer has specific instructions for you to get this […]
Hi folks.
In case anyone has missed the obvious – and had to go away searching like I did – to set the ‘Unique 3 Digit Code’ to WordPress blogs, you will have to set your Permalink structure to:
/%postname%-%post_id%/
As default his will produce URL’s such as yoursite.com/my-favourite-news-article-1/
This is where the trick comes in handy. IF, like me, you have not yet added any news articles to your blog, edit your MySQL database and set the autoincrement start value to 100 for wp_posts – thus, your first post will have ID 100, then 101, 102, 103 and so on. Now your URLs will be like yoursite.com/my-favourite-news-article-100/
Remember you can change the permalink structure to suit not only Google News, but also for SEO purposes.
Thanks for posting the code above, I’m now well on my way to integrating WordPress with an ecommerce solution to build an online store/news resource.
Cheers