Duplicate images and other issues

  • I have the feed for my site listed in Google News and I am using this plugin but there are several issues.

    – The urls for the gn feeds do dont work.

    – Duplicate images are showing for the posts; most are using the “chip shortage” image which is just the image for one of the articles; not all of them.

    – The description and content:encoded tags are both present. According to Google that is an error.

    I contacted Google about these issues and their response is below.

    Response from Google…

    Thank you for contacting the Google News team.

We took a look into your query and screenshot provided. We have reviewed your feed URL “https://learn.gototags.com/feed” and we noticed that the same image source is being repeated multiple times and your image tag is not encoded as intended. We have attached the screenshots for your reference. There are few requirement which need to be followed while adding the image to your content, they are: 

The images should be a minimum of 800 px on a side.
The hero image encoding should be done using the <img> tag and the attribute class should be: <img class="type:primaryImage">.
Additionally we would like to inform you that you are using both <description> and <content:encoded> tags in the feed URL. We’ve attached a screenshot for your reference. Instead, we suggest that you use any one of the tags. If both <content:encoded>  and <description> tags are present in the feed, Google News crawls the tag with the least number of characters.

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

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi Craig,

    hmmm, there are a number of things going on here…

    1) The url for the feed, /feed/ should be displaying the default wordpress feed, and appending /gn/ should display the GN Publisher feed. However, your default WP feeds don’t appear to be generated at all, including category feeds. Do you have another plugin that is perhaps manipulating feeds or urls?

    2) Images – the GN Publisher feed is correctly identifying your featured image as the primary image, as per the Google News feed technical guidelines. It’s unusual for it to not pick that up correctly. They do ask that images be at least 800px on the shortest side. However, it looks like the image they are picking up has the same dimensions as the one that we have marked as primary, so that shouldn’t make a difference. This is a mystery, I’m contemplating it…

    3) I’m embarrassed for Google News, but they are wrong about the desc/content tags. They have misread their own documentation. I’ve told them numerous times they are giving out wrong information but it hasn’t been corrected. If you look at the technical guidelines I linked to above, you’ll see there is no ban on using both tags – and that they use the tag with the – most – characters. Not the least! Both tags are used so that the feed passes the validation test they recommend, and using the tag with the least amount of characters wouldn’t make any sense, as they ask publishers to include the full article, not a summary ??

    The url issue, there’s something else manipulating something there… the wrong image being used… that shouldn’t be happening… let me think on that some…

    Chris

    The links with the large images at the bottom of each page that link to additional articles – normally those would not be included in the article content – they would be outside of the article/post itself and included automatically be the theme.

    It looks like they are being added as part of the post content though, otherwise they wouldn’t be in the feed and that image wouldn’t be included with each post, and therefor wouldn’t be picked up by Google as part of the article.

    Do you add those manually when you write the article, like put them in as a block when you make a post?

    Thread Starter craigtadlock

    (@craigtadlock)

    I have a better idea of whats going on here, but I do think there are some Google bugs. Not sure about the URL issue.

    This is a multi-site wordpress install; often that causes issues with plugins.. possibly the reason for the url issue.

    We use several plugins including Yoast, not sure what would be affecting the urls.

    The category feed urls are generated; here is an example:
    https://learn.gototags.com/articles/category/customers/feed

    We use the Enfold theme and use their custom layout editor for posts, not the standard WordPress layout. The related posts at the bottom are a part of each posts’s content.

    Google is looking into the issue of the primary image; I think its a bug on their side.
    We have looked into your query and we would like to apologize for the inconvenience caused. In regards to your issue related to rendering of incorrect images we have escalated your feedback to the relevant team. We appreciate you taking the time to share your experience with us.

    For now Im going to remove the related posts sections on each post which should work around google’s image issue. I would like to get the url issue resolved. How best can we work through that?

    Thanks for cc’ing me on the support correspondence.

    Using the web location is unreliable and doesn’t work well for most publishers. Using the feed method is much faster and more reliable.

    Yoast usually only affects the urls if the Yoast option to remove the /category/ part of the url is enabled. However- GN Publisher has not been tested extensively with multi-site setups, so that might be affecting things.

    If you are okay with using the /feed/ url, that is okay. It is generating a valid feed, so it works. That’s not the way I intended it to work and it doesn’t work that way on most sites. Just keep it in mind and if you make changes in your site that might affect the url, double-check to make sure it’s still working as expected. In the meantime I’ll have my developer look into it.

    Okay, here’s a tricky thing about the Publisher Center. They cache the articles, indefinitely. So the articles you have in the Publisher Center won’t self-correct after you take those related posts off. You’ll have to tell the Publisher Center that the article has been updated by making a slight change in the publication date. So… for each article you want to ‘refresh’ in the Publisher Center, edit that post and just add, say, one minute, to the publication time. The bot will see that the pubdate time has changed and reload the article into their cache when the feed refreshes.

    Sounds a little silly I know, that’s the way it works though… ??

    Chris

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘Duplicate images and other issues’ is closed to new replies.