Urgent indexing issue

Hi Blake, I checked your news sitemap and it response with the correct headers, and timestamps. It responds quickly and shows no signs of being cached or serving stale content.

Have you submitted both the regular sitemap.xml and sitemap-news.xml in your Search Console? Try removing and resubmitting them both.

And what about your Publisher Center? Do you get any information there that could explain the issue? And under your News Publication when you go to “Google News” and scroll down, you should see an “Example”. Does it include your latest posts?

Hi Ravan,

Yes, both sitemaps have been submitted to GSC. However, Google has not scanned the news sitemap in more than 24 hours. Usually it’s scanned at least 10 times a day.

In addition, the number of posts that GSC says it has scanned in the main sitemap is way out of date. GSC is missing about 70 new posts.

I have already tried removing and resubmitting the sitemaps.

Publisher Center is also acting strange because it is not updating unless I manually hit the ‘refresh’ button. We never had to do that before. If we do, then our latest posts are in there.

I have checked and our RSS feed appears to be properly pinging Google, so I don’t think that’s the issue either.

Cheers,
Blake

• This reply was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by xjamasterx.

Publisher Center is also acting strange because it is not updating unless I manually hit the ‘refresh’ button.

The browser Refresh button?

In your Publisher Center, open up the Google News block and hit the Edit button. Then switch to the “Review and publish” tab (at the top).

At “Google News app publishing status” it should say something like

LIVE – xxx followers
Content last updated xxx, 2021

Does the date show today or an older date?

Then click the link under “Testing your publication”. If you open that link, does it show you the latest posts immediately?

Maybe verify the settings on all other tabs. Like under “Distribution” on the General tab, have you set specific countries or worldwide?

Make a change, even if it’s only an extra space at the end of the “Description” and hit Save at the top right.

And maybe set Distribution to Worldwide. I only found your site when GN is in US English…

Hi Ravan,

Unfortunately that didn’t work.

We’re set to worldwide and everything appears to be working. Google Publisher says we’re live but the feed only updates when I hit the ‘Refresh’ button in Google Publisher under Edit/Content Settings.

We’re seeing that Google Adsense is reporting a crawl issue and they describe it as a server overload… so we’re seeing if our host is the issue.

Browsing your site I noticed no slow responses or errors. Does your host have a graph about resource usage (look for load spikes) or error logs that could tell if the google crawler (look for user agent “Googlebot” or “Googlebot-News”) encountered error responses?