SEO for news publishers on WordPress

Pages every news publishers site needs

• Article pages. One URL per story, with the headline, byline, publication and update times visible near the top.
• Staff and author pages. A page per journalist with their beat, background and contact. Bylines should link here.
• Section pages. Politics, business, local and other sections as indexable hubs that surface the newest stories quickly.
• Topic or tag hubs. Evergreen pages for running stories (an election, a trial) that collect coverage in one place.
• Editorial policy pages. Masthead, ownership, corrections policy, ethics and funding. Google News content policies expect this transparency.

Top Stories, Google News and the news sitemap

Publishers no longer apply to Google News; Google considers eligible content automatically, and Publisher Center is for managing how your publication appears. AMP has not been required for Top Stories since 2021, and Article markup is recommended rather than required.

A news sitemap speeds discovery. Hydrogen SEO publishes one at /news-sitemap.xml once you switch it on under Hydrogen SEO > Sitemap. It lists articles from the last 48 hours, newest first, up to 1,000, and leaves out noindexed, password-protected and canonicalized posts. Set Publication to the exact name you use on news.google.com, limit Only from to your news categories if you also publish evergreen content, and use Exclude from Google News on individual posts such as sponsored content. Submit it in Search Console.

Bylines, staff pages and honest dates

Every story should carry a byline that links to a staff page. Author archives get a fixed noindex in Hydrogen SEO, so build indexable staff pages as regular pages (with a Person in their markup) and link bylines to them; the author archive can still list the reporter's stories for readers.

Dates are a trust signal Google watches. Show datePublished and dateModified accurately, in the page and in markup, with a time zone. Change the modified time only for a substantive update, and add a correction or update note explaining what changed. Republishing old stories with a new date to look fresh is the kind of manipulation Google's news guidance warns against.

NewsArticle markup and paywalls

Hydrogen SEO's Article schema can run site-wide with smart tags for headline, author and dates. To output NewsArticle instead, change the type in the hydrogen_seo_schema_markup filter:

add_filter( 'hydrogen_seo_schema_markup', function ( $schema, $post_id, $schema_type ) {
    if ( 'Article' === $schema_type && in_category( 'news', $post_id ) ) {
        $schema['@type'] = 'NewsArticle';
    }
    return $schema;
}, 10, 3 );

For paywalled stories, mark the article isAccessibleForFree: false and point hasPart at the CSS class of the gated section. This tells Google that showing crawlers more than logged-out readers is a paywall rather than cloaking. Use LiveBlogPosting for live coverage with timestamped updates. Discover favors large images, so add max-image-preview:large with the hydrogen_seo_robots_directives filter.

NewsArticle schema example

A starting point for your site. Replace every value with your own, and only mark up what is visible on the page.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "NewsArticle",
  "headline": "County Approves $42 Million Bond for Riverfront Flood Walls",
  "image": [
    "https://example.com/images/flood-walls-16x9.jpg",
    "https://example.com/images/flood-walls-4x3.jpg",
    "https://example.com/images/flood-walls-1x1.jpg"
  ],
  "datePublished": "2026-09-29T18:40:00-05:00",
  "dateModified": "2026-09-29T21:05:00-05:00",
  "author": [
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Tomas Reyes",
      "url": "https://example.com/staff/tomas-reyes/"
    }
  ],
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "NewsMediaOrganization",
    "name": "The Riverbend Ledger",
    "logo": {
      "@type": "ImageObject",
      "url": "https://example.com/logo.png"
    }
  },
  "isAccessibleForFree": false,
  "hasPart": {
    "@type": "WebPageElement",
    "isAccessibleForFree": false,
    "cssSelector": ".paywalled-content"
  }
}

Checklist

• Turn on the news sitemap and set the exact publication name
• Limit the news sitemap to news categories if you mix content
• Exclude sponsored content from the news sitemap
• Link every byline to an indexable staff page
• Show publish and update times with time zones
• Add an update note whenever you change dateModified
• Publish masthead, ownership and corrections policy pages
• Mark paywalled sections with isAccessibleForFree and hasPart
• Use three image ratios at least 1200px wide in article markup
• Output NewsArticle for news posts
• Allow large image previews for Discover