Yoast News Plugin Extension - Thoughts?

[tslb]

Hello!

I'm looking at picking up the Yoast News SEO plugin extension to add to our company's wordpress site. We're a UK manufacturer but have lots of regular news stories (new products, industry info, new projects etc.) that is relevant to our niche market.

We'd love to get these stories featured into the Google News feed and this may be a route.

Anyone using the plugin? Any thoughts?

Thanks

[jgodwin]

Does Google ding a site that uses the Yoast News Plug-in when it is not a news site?  Are there any other precautions to take in using this plug-in?  Like not posting too many stories as "news'?  One of our competitor's uses Facebook as their publisher.

[MatthewBrown]

My experience is that it works well to generate the specific XML sitemap formats, meta news keywords tags, and the Editor's Picks RSS feed. These can be a pain to do if you're not a web developer, so it's a fair price for the automation. It goes particularly deep on the various news sitemap options. I've had no trouble using it or walking clients through the basics.

It won't organize any of the details you need to get into Google News however (site URL structure, frequency of news publishing, multiple author requirements, etc).

Cheers,

Matthew

[KaneJamison]

The Yoast team has plenty of experience with large publishers, so my guess is that this is the most robust option you have for Wordpress.

But, I don't have any insights for you on the peculiarities of the plugin and things to watch out for. Will forward it along to other folks in case they have any notes.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

I don't use the plugin, but it is worth making sure that you tick all the boxes for Google News. They are still picky about what they show and internal news and product launches are something they can be a bit funny about.

However, I do have 2 clients that use this without issue and it works really well for them

-Andy