Google News Referral Traffic Gone after CMS Upgrade
-
Hoping someone can help. I've tried the Google forum which is it's usual vacuous hole of no help.
We recently upgraded our CMS which now includes automated sitemaps (not sure if this impacts news sitemaps, though). Anyway, after rollout, we're no longer getting any traffic from Google News.
Sequence of Events:
1. Dec. 13 launch
2. Google news referral traffic stopped
3. IT tried to 'fix' and now we're getting the elusive 'publication name' message
The publication name specified in your Sitemap does not match the publication name we have for your site in our database. Please check that the publication name in your Sitemap exactly matches the publication name displayed for your articles in Google News.
4. Retested sitemap
When I retest the news sitemap, it returns 0 errors.
When I do a site:mnn.com (our website) on the Google New Homepage, new content is showing up in SERP
Yet, still no google news referral traffic.
Our news sitemap is www.mnn.com/googlenews.xml
Can someone help? We're a news site, and can't afford to lose this traffic. Would love an early Christmas present.
Thanks!!
Lisa
-
Hey Lisa,
I was just reading a post about Google News errors and I remembered your question.
This part might help?
Unknown publication name – an error that I frequently come across in troubleshooting Google News issues is an “unknown publication name” error for the Google News sitemap, which is reported in the Sitemaps section of the site’s Google Webmaster Tools profile**.** This error is triggered when the publication name used in the <name>tags in the Google News sitemap is not an exact match to the publication name in Google News’ database</name>. To determine the correct name to use do a [site:domain] search in Google News and see what publication name is displayed for the indexed pages**.**
Source: http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/the-most-common-google-news-errors/
-
Lisa,
Tough one. Sorry for the delay, had to ping a few folks.
As for the naming error, is it possible that the site was registered in Google News originally with a slightly different name? In the application form, the name of the publication is a pretty important step, and any minor difference might raise a flag. The Sitemap calls the publication "Mother Nature Network". Perhaps it was registered with something slightly different?
Another thought: Considering the site is showing up when you do a Google News Site Search, is it possible that the traffic hasn't disappeared overall, but it's just not being properly attributed in Google Analytics anymore?
-
BTW, I already posted my issue in the google news publisher forum to no avail.
-
It quite literally coincided with the rollout of the new CMS. We averaged 2K visits a day from Google News and now we get nothing.
-
We recently upgraded our CMS which now includes automated sitemaps (not sure if this impacts news sitemaps, though).
How did it work previously?
Did traffic go down in general? I know there G changed the way analytics interprets image/product based searches and just changes how they were categorized (still receiving the traffic, just labeled differently)
I also recommend posting your issue here and seeing if a rep can help get it resolved.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Recovering from a Google penalty
Hi there, So about 3.5 weeks ago I noticed my website (www.authenticstyle.co.uk) had gone from ranking in second place for our main key phrase "web design dorset" to totally dropping off the SERP's for that particular search phrase - it's literally no where to be seen. It seems that other pages of my website still rank, but the homepage. I then noticed that I had an unread alert in my Google Search Console account to say that a staging site we were hosting on a subdomain (the subdomain was domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk) had hacked content - it was a couple of PDF files with weird file names. The strange thing is we'd taken this staging site down a few weeks earlier, BUT one of my staff had left an A record set up in our Cloudflare account pointing to that staging server - they'd forgotten to remove it when removing the staging site. I then removed the A record, myself and submitted a reconsideration request on Google Search Console (which I still haven't received confirmation of) in the hope of everything sorting itself out. Since then I've also grabbed a Moz Pro account to try and dig a little deeper, but without any success. We have a few warnings for old 404's, some missing meta descs on some pages, and some backlinks that have accumulated over time that have hghish spam rating, but nothing major - nothing that would warrant a penalty as far as I can tell. From what I can make out, we've been issued a penalty on our homepage only, but I don't understand why we would get penalised for hacked content if that site domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk no longer existed (would it just be due to that erroneous A record we forgot to remove?). I contacted a few freelance SEO experts and one came back to me saying I'd done everything correctly and that I should see our site appearing again in a few days after submitting the reconsideration request. Its been 3 weeks and nothing. I'm at a huge loss as to how my site can recover from this. What would you recommend? I even tried getting our homepage to rank for a variation of "web design dorset", but it seems our homepage has been penalised for anything with "dorset" in the keyphrase. Any pointers would be HUGELY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Will
Technical SEO | | wsmith7270 -
Is the Google results serp broken?
Hi everyone! We've been trying to decipher how many of our pages are indexed by google at the moment. If we do the usual "site:https://www.hobbydb.com" search term, the serp says that we have more than 740,000 pages indexed. However, when I do a deep dive and click through to the last page of results, I can only get to page 54, and then there are no more results. This would mean that I only have 540 pages indexed, not 740,000. We have also done other queries for other sub-sections of our website, and the results also truncate at 50 pages. Has anyone run into this problem? Any suggestions are appreciated! Best, Alex
Technical SEO | | mpchobbydb0 -
My some pages are not showing cached in Google, WHY?
I have website http://www.vipcollisionlv.com/ and when i check the cache status with tags **site:http:vipcollisionlv.com, **some page has no cache status..
Technical SEO | | 1akalyou can see this in image. How to resolve this issue. please help me.
0 -
Google not using redirect
We have a GEO-IP redirect in place for our domain, so that users are pointed to the subfolder relevant for their region, e.g: Visit example.com from the UK and you will be redirected to example.com/uk This works fine when you manually type the domain into your browser, however if you search for the site and come to example.com, you end up at example.com I didn't think this was too much of an issue but our subfolders /uk and /au are not getting ranked at all in Google, even for branded keywords. I'm wondering if the fact that Google isn't picking up the redirect means that the pages aren't being indexed properly? Conversely our US region (example.com/us) is being ranked well. Has anyone encountered a similar issue?
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
Google is not respecting the meta title
We're experiencing a peculiar situation with Google not respecting our meta <title>.</p> <p>As you can see in the first image (search result), the title <a href="http://open.iebschool.com/profesores/startups/">for the page</a> is a part of the content. This is relatevely normal for the description, but we never heard of Google doing this before.</p> <p>In the code, the <title> and meta description are correctly implemented.</p> <blockquote style="background-color: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> <p><meta name="description" content="Profesores, tutores, autores y docentes 2.0 de Open IEBS. Conoce su Biografía, experiencia, reputación, conexiones sociales y las valoraciones de alumnos."/><br /><title>Conoce los profesores, tutores, autores y docentes de Open IEBS.</title> In a further research, we discovered that the title which is using is an in anwith the following code (cleaned and simplified for the question): <hgroup> Pilar Soro
Technical SEO | | ofuente
0 Seguidor
Para poder seguir al Profesor, debes de registrarte aquí. Profesora y experta en redes sociales. Formadora de docentes, [...]
</hgroup> Note: we're correcting the code since this is quite messy, but it's the one we have now The point is that google has considered that this particular is more important than the title itself. This would make sense if we were looking for that name, but the search was simply "site:domain.com". Two things for which this is even more strange are the following: while all the /profesor/%category%/ has the same code, this only happens in some search results and not in all of them; why is it appearing in some pages, but respecting my title in others? the previous code is not the only one in the page, there are about 10 others and some are placed before and some are placed after; so, why this one and not the first or the last? What is more strange is why this article in particular and not any other of the 10 on the page since some of them are placed before and some of them are placed after. Provided this situation, we would like to know: is this a common situation? Is it happening to more people? why is it happening? Is it somehow related to , <hgroup>and ? why that piece of code and not any other article? and why is it only happening in some pages? more important, can it be corrected or can we take advantage of it somehow? Thank you in advance. Any light you can shed on this will be well received! AJ2CUSe.png?1?8232 </hgroup>0 -
Does Site Structure Affect Google
Hi - I'm pretty new at this. We’re running an e-commerce affiliate site at http://www.mydomain.com. So we don’t take payments but customer gets passed through to third party sites when they select to buy a product. We have a blog at http://www.mydomain.com/news. I think Google is treating these 2 sites as as separate sites for PR. For this reason we're thinking about moving this to http://news.mydomain.com. Anyone have any experience in this?
Technical SEO | | richardjoseph0 -
Removing irrelevant items from Google News?
A client wants to know if it's possible to get Google to remove stories from Google News feeds if those stories have nothing to do with the client? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | JamesAMartin0 -
Google Sandboxing
I have a new site with a new domain that ranked well the 1st week or so after it was indexed then it totally dropped off the SERP. My question is, does Google Sandboxing affect new sites on new domains that don't have any incoming links? The site dropped off before I began link building - from what I've read unnatural link build is often the cause. Can you still be sandboxed without any link building? If this is the case, are there things I can do to get out of the sandbox? Thanks folks, Jason
Technical SEO | | OptioPublishing0