Google News Referral Traffic Gone after CMS Upgrade

[Aggie]

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

[OlegKorneitchouk]

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.

[Aggie]

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.

[Aggie]

BTW, I already posted my issue in the google news publisher forum to no avail.

[mikecp]

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?

[mikecp]

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/