After adding your Google News Sitemap to your the list of sitemaps in your Search Console account, you may encounter this error 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.
Google Search Console
The Publication name in your Google News Sitemap is, by default, the same as your Site Title as defined on Settings > General. This might not be the the exact name under which your site is known as a news source by Google News.
If this is the case, you have two options:
- Either change your site title to the name used in Google News or…
- Go to Settings > Google News and enter the correct (but different) name in the Publication name field.
Note: you may have different Publication names that start with one common name followed by something between parentheses, like My News (Opinion) and My News (Sports). Make sure to use only the common name for your site title or the Publication name field, ignore the rest.
How do I find my site’s Publication name?
If your site was submitted via Publisher Center before it was discovered by Google News, then the publication name will most likely be the exact name you have entered in your Google Publisher Center account.
Go to https://publishercenter.google.com/ log in and open the news source in question (you may have more than one) under NEWS PUBLICATIONS. Then Go to Publication settings and verify the name in the “Publication name” field.
Your site may also have been previously discovered by Google News and known under another name. Maybe you changed the Site Title at some point? In any case, you may need to find out under which name your site is known by following these steps:
- Go to Google News.
- At the bottom left, make sure you set your language and region to the region in which your site should be present.
- Then at the top, click Search
.
- Enter search terms, like the title or topic of a recent news post from your site, or your site name.
- Tip: To narrow your search results, click the Down arrow
. You can enter an exact phrase, include or exclude words, pick a date range, or enter your site URL (like nytimes.com).
- Try to find among the search results a post from your site, the Publication name should appear right underneath the post title. It may also appear as a NEWS SOURCE with your site icon on the right side.
Can one site have different Publication names?
In your Publisher Center, you can have multiple Organizations and each organization can hold multiple News Publications. A news publication can be on a unique domain or a subdomain or a subdirectory of your main site. So in short: yes, one site can house multiple news publications, each with their own name.
But…
And that is a big but (which I can’t deny): In the current versions of both the free XML Sitemap & Google News and the Google News Advanced plugins, you can only set one publication name. So if you host multiple news sources on the same WordPress site, then you may need to take care to follow the following example and instructions.
Let’s say, for example, you have a news site on myaminews.com and you provide news in both English and Spanish. You have a multilingual plugin like Polylang on your site and you set up each language on a subdirectory: myaminews.com/en/ and myaminews.com/es/. Your site title in English is Myami News, in Spanish it is Noticias Myami.
You have added two different news sources in your Publisher Center, each with their own language and each based on the URL with respective subdirectory. This is a good idea because you are targeting different language groups.
To make this work with XML Sitemap & Google News, make sure you define in your Publisher Center each Publisher name with one common name, then followed by anything you wish to distinguish between them in parenthesis. Like just Myami News or Myami News (English) for the English version and Myami News (Noticias Myami) or Myami News (Espagnol) for the Spanish version. Then set only the common name on your site under Publisher name on Settings > Google News, in this example Myami News.