Google News, without the folklore.
Most advice about Google News is guesswork dressed as certainty. This module implements what Google actually publishes, and is careful to say which parts are requirements, which are recommendations, and which are neither.
Two days. One thousand. No exceptions.
Google asks that a News sitemap contains articles published in the previous two days, and caps each file at 1,000 URLs. Both are enforced here rather than left as settings you're expected to know about.
Articles fall out of the sitemap automatically as they age. Cross the thousand mark and additional files are created and added to the index for you.
The part that matters most: publication_date
is derived from the article's original publication time. Editing a story — fixing a
typo, swapping an image, running a bulk update — never re-dates it in Google News.
<urlset xmlns:news="…/sitemap-news/0.9"> <url> <loc>https://herald.example/council-budget/</loc> <news:news> <news:publication> <news:name>The Herald</news:name> <news:language>en</news:language> </news:publication> <news:publication_date>2026-09-15T18:06:56+00:00</…> <news:title>Council approves budget</news:title> <news:stock_tickers>NASDAQ:AAPL</…> </news:news> </url> </urlset>
Excluded globally
Opinion, sponsored, press releases and evergreen explainers can be kept out by content type or category.
Excluded per article
One checkbox in the editor removes a single story, without touching its normal SEO.
Three kinds of edit, three different outcomes.
Not every save is an update. Ptero SEO hashes the title, content, excerpt and featured image on every save, so it knows whether anything editorial actually changed.
Minor correction
A typo, a formatting fix, a clarification. dateModified holds. The correction note can be emitted as schema.org correction.
Substantial update
Material new information. dateModified advances and the change is written to the article's history with who made it and when.
Republished
The story was rewritten and reissued. Dates move deliberately, and the original publication date is preserved for the audit trail.
And if something moves a publication date forward on an article more than two days old without marking it as a republication, the editor gets a warning. Google explicitly advises publishers against artificially refreshing stories that have no substantial new information — so the plugin makes that an active decision rather than an accident.
It loads the page like a reader would.
Having a publication date in the database proves nothing. The checker fetches the rendered article and confirms the date, the time and the byline are visible in the HTML a crawler receives — which also catches bodies that only render client-side.
Alongside it, a site-wide audit looks for the transparency pages Google's guidance discusses: About, Contact, editorial policy, corrections policy, ownership and funding, advertising disclosure, author pages and author biographies.
Missing items are reported as “Google News transparency recommendation missing” — never as a ranking factor, because they aren't one.
An image-led surface, audited as one.
Google recommends high-quality images at least 1200 pixels wide and
max-image-preview:large enabled. Both are handled, and the
common ways publishers get it wrong are flagged before publication.
Large previews on
max-image-preview:large is forced on qualifying news articles automatically.
Width warnings
Featured images under 1200px are flagged with their actual size, in the editor, before you hit publish.
Wrong image detection
Catches the site logo, the default placeholder and filenames that look like stock art being used as article images.
Crop preview
Shows the 16:9 card crop so you see what gets cut before a reader does, and warns on near-square images.
What this module will not tell you
It will not tell you that passing every check gets you into Google News. Inclusion is Google's decision, and structured data is not itself a requirement for Top Stories eligibility.
It will not give you an E-E-A-T score, because Google does not publish one.
What it will do is make sure your sitemap obeys the documented limits, your dates stay honest, your schema is complete and valid, and the transparency signals Google asks publishers for are actually present on the page. That's the part you control.