featured images missing in Google News feed

  • hi – just found today that Google News isn’t picking up featured images correctly. The URL: https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBwgKMKG3mgswu8GyAw/sections/CAQqEAgAKgcICjCht5oLMLvBsgMwuJrdBg?hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB%3Aen

    The odd thing is that this was working fine until around mid-August, when something must have changed. Your advice suggests that Google won’t pick up anything less than 800 on the shortest side but most of my featured images were 400 or so. Since then the sizes have been a mix of small and 1200+, but, after this August point, Google News will ignore all featured images and instead pick up any embedded Youtube video and use the preview from that as the image for the news summary. (not all posts have a video, of course).

    This is more of an annoyance than a critical problem as I’ve never had any news items picked up by Google anyway, but I suppose in the unlikely event of it being considered by the overlords there this wouldn’t help, so it’d be good to find an answer. Thanks!

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

  • Hi smchugh,

    What are the urls to the two feeds you are using to populate those sections?

    Chris

    Thread Starter smchugh

    (@smchugh)

    hi – https://www.jockrock.org/category/releases/feed/gn
    and
    https://www.jockrock.org/category/news/feed/gn

    Thanks

    Stuart

    Hey Stuart,

    What the feed does is include whatever image is set to the ‘featured’ image for the article, and marks it as ‘primary’ so Google News knows that’s the one you want to display.

    In the feeds you listed, there’s no featured images at all…

    When you write an article, do you add the image as a featured image, and your theme places it in the article… or do you add it manually to the article, as in a block, and use it that way?

    Normally if it is added as a featured image and included in the feed, Google News will display it pretty reliably. They do ask in their ‘requirements’ that images be 800px on the shortest side, but enforcement of that is (thankfully) lax,

    Chris

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by christopheran.
    Thread Starter smchugh

    (@smchugh)

    Hi Chris – no, I just add a simple featured image from the dialog – can be .jpg or more often than not .png, sometimes over 800, usually not. As you say, none appear, but the feeds don’t go back very far i.e. as far as August when the problem began.

    (By the way, I have another site – isthismusic.com – which is in Publisher in draft mode, so it’s no real test but its preview seems to have a similar problem – Google is picking up images from the body, not the featured image)

    Thanks – Stuart

    I’m sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Had a client with a server crises that took up almost every waking hour for a couple of days!

    Expected usage would be to set a featured image, then the theme ads it to the article in the same location on every article and also use it for other locations where the post is promoted (home/sections/etc).

    If you are able to do that, then GN Publisher will include the featured image in the feed and mark it has ‘primary’. Google News picks those up reliably. If it’s picking it up during a crawl from the page itself, it’s not so reliable…

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by christopheran.
    Thread Starter smchugh

    (@smchugh)

    No worries, know you have other work to get on with aside from the plugin! Er, I think you described how the theme works, yes, the featured image is always at the top of a post and it also shows up in the home page whenever it’s the newest article, and yes, in the section listings as well.

    So from what you say it shouldn’t rely on getting the image from a GN crawl (which is just as well since I’m not sure Google News bothers to crawl it anyway!)

    All I can say apart from that is it was working fine until a few months ago. We know Google constantly moves the goalposts in everything it does so I’m not surprised that something has got broken!

    If you are using the ‘featured image’ link in the sidebar to set an image when you write a post, it should place the url to the image in the feed. Unless… are you using any other plugins that manipulate feeds?

    Thread Starter smchugh

    (@smchugh)

    Aside from login and security plugins and the likes of Heartbeat and QueryMonitor, all I have in that ballpark are Google XML Sitemaps, Jetpack, Litespeed Cache, Cloudflare, Onesignal Push, Secondary Title, Wordfence and Yoast. I don’t think any of these use feeds and they’re all pretty common… I could try turning everything off sometime when I publish a new item I guess…

    No, I don’t think any of those would affect the feed…

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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