Red Jaguar – News Sitemap & Schema

Description

Red Jaguar – News Sitemap & Schema helps newsrooms publish the technical signals news search engines look for, and tells them in plain language what is still missing. It was built for small and independent newsrooms, including those that work under pressure, so it also checks what the site reveals about the people who make it.

Everything Google News needs is here, free: the news sitemap, the structured data and the readiness check. It stays free, with every update included, and we keep improving it based on what newsrooms ask for.

News sitemap

• Follows the Google News specification: articles from the last 48 hours (up to 1,000), publication name and language.
• Language per article from Polylang or WPML.
• Leave out a single article from the editor, or limit the sitemap to some categories.
• Detects the news sitemaps of Yoast News SEO, Rank Math and XML Sitemap & Google News, and is listed in the sitemap index of Yoast SEO and Rank Math.
• Clears the cache of LiteSpeed, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, Nginx Helper and Cloudflare when it changes.

Structured data

• NewsArticle and NewsMediaOrganization, with logo, location and your editorial policies (corrections, ethics, ownership and funding, and more).
• Works with Yoast SEO and Rank Math: it completes their markup instead of printing a second copy.
• Authors with job title, biography and public profiles, filled in from each user’s profile. Accounts that sign as the newsroom are attributed to the organization, not to a person.
• A “Credit” field for each image in the media library, published as the photo credit.
• Co-Authors Plus support.

Readiness check

About 80 checks against the pages your site actually publishes: crawling and indexing, robots.txt, the news sitemap, structured data, images, dates and time zone, author pages, editorial policies, newsroom protection, HTTPS. Each problem comes with how to fix it, step by step.

• Runs every day. The results are in the plugin, on the Dashboard and in Tools → Site Health.
• Recognizes test copies (staging, development) and does not report what is normal there.
• Manual checklist for what WordPress cannot verify, such as Google Search Console.
• A check in the block editor before publishing: featured image size, alternative text, photo credit and the author’s biography.

Newsroom protection checks

The readiness check looks for what can expose the people who make the news, and explains how to fix each thing by hand:

• photos published with their GPS position or the serial number of the camera or phone;
• author page addresses that reveal the login name;
• the list of users that WordPress publishes in its API;
• bylines that show a login name, and authors who protect their identity but keep their real name in their profile.

Each author can tick “Protect my identity” in their profile so the plugin stops suggesting public profiles and contacts for them.

Red Jaguar – News Sitemap & Schema Pro

An optional paid add-on, for newsrooms that want the plugin to do more of the work: it removes the location and device data from photos automatically, hides the user list, adds an authors screen, an author box, editorial policy templates in Spanish and English, email alerts, language and article type by category and WP-CLI commands. This plugin works fully without it.

Paying newsrooms fund donated licenses for independent and at-risk media, endorsed by chequea.la, seguridades.org and allied organizations. More at redjaguar.agency/plugins.

Privacy

• The plugin does not contact any external service, does not track visitors, sets no cookies and sends no emails. The readiness check only requests pages of your own site.
• It publishes about each author only what the newsroom fills in: job title, biography, profiles and an optional public contact. It never publishes the email of their account.
• It stores its settings, the last results of the readiness check (which name articles and authors with problems) and the profile fields above in your WordPress database. Only administrators see the results. Removing the plugin deletes all of it.
• The article setting “Exclude from the news sitemap” is only visible in the REST API to people who can edit the article.

Google News is a trademark of Google LLC. This plugin is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google.