When I switched my site to Newsmag, Google stopped indexing my images for Google News. First I thought this was an issue with Yoast News SEO, but apparently everything is working there.
I fear this issue might be related to the theme?
I contaced Google News and got this answer:
Hi Erik,
Thank you for your note.
If your images aren’t appearing next to your articles, I’d recommend reviewing our image guidelines for suggestions on how to fix this issue. While we can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to include all your images, these suggestions will increase the likelihood of the inclusion of your images in Google News.
Please keep in mind that in order to show as many different sources to our users as possible, we sometimes pair relevant images with articles from different sources.
Thanks for your interest in Google News.
Regards,
Brenna
The Google News Team
Any help would be much appreciated!
Not a theme issue aside from the fact that changing themes can sometimes throw off Google News if they are scraping your photos still and NOT reading the XML news sitemap.
One of my sites switched to Newsmag this past Sat. and no trouble with images in Google News. We’ve been using the Newspaper theme for 12+ months with couple of sites in Google News, also without issue.
Just remember
For best results with Google News you should be using a NEWS SITEMAP in addition to your normal sitemap. The NEWS sitemap will have de facto link to image in the news sitemap XML. Google is now finally using that, unlike as recently as Nov. 2014.
AND:
1) you should have the image in your META data (e.g., OG tags)
2) you should have an actual image in the body of the post/story, as Google prefers that to say, the giant background image behind everything like the title of story.
3) Google doesn’t like GIFs
4) Google News will more often skip anything which looks like a logo, chart, or advert now; meaning something without a full color range of a photo; we trick them sometimes by putting a logo on a gradient background
5) Google News may skip an image which is too small
Our sites have been in Google News since it first launched in BETA 10 years ago, so we have to deal with this on daily basis. 🙂
Hope that helps!
