Creating an automatic news sitemap for a TypePad blog

Google News is one of the most popular news sources on the internet. It is a very convenient way to obtain information about, practically anything which happened in the World. The news is submitted by Google News Publishers, which are either websites like The Guardian is, or simple blog-like websites, just like Devoracles is.

The publishing software used also differs massively: one news publisher uses custom coded engines, others use some open source software like WordPress is, and there are people which use closed source, hosted engines like TypePad is.

Google News finds the articles on the publishers’ websites either by looking at so called “news hubs” – a page which lists in a human-readable way the links to the articles -, or looking at so called “news sitemaps”. The news sitemaps are XML files using a specific markup, which is described and presented here.

Obtaining a news sitemap can be quite difficult with TypePad as you have to get familiar with advanced template tags while with for example WordPress, a news sitemap can be created by simply installing a plugin.

In order to create a news sitemap with TypePad, please follow the below steps:

1. Log in to your administration back-end, then go to Weblogs >> Design
2. Click on the Create New Index Template link
3. In the Template Name field type Google News Sitemap
   In the Output file field type news_sitemap.xml
4. In the box labeled Template Body copy paste the following code:
   
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
<MTEntries lastn="10" days="3">
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>
<news:news>
<news:publication_date> <$MTEntryDate format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$> </news:publication_date>
</news:news>
</url>
</MTEntries>
</urlset>

5. Save the tamplate
6. Try to access the sitemap by navigating to http://example.com/news_sitemap.xml, where example.com is your blog’s domain name.
7. Add the URL of the news sitemap to your Google Webmaster Tool account

There is only one thing which can go wrong, specifically that while copying the code, a linebreak or whitespace appears in a place where it shouldn’t. To resolve this issue, just compare the source of your sitemap and the sample which Google provided.