The Yoast News SEO plugin is a tool designed to optimize news content on WordPress websites for Google News. It works in conjunction with the Yoast SEO plugin (both free and premium versions) to provide users with technical SEO best practices for their news websites.

The plugin automatically generates News sitemaps and immediately pings Google when a new post is published, so that search engines can discover and understand the news articles on the website. This feature saves time and eliminates the need for users to manually submit sitemaps to Google.

In addition, the plugin adds relevant schema.org markup to news articles, which allows Google to crawl and index them more efficiently. This ensures that news articles are properly indexed and displayed in Google News search results.

The Yoast News SEO plugin also allows users to do more advanced News SEO by providing the ability to decide which articles should be included in the Google News XML sitemap and to add stock tickers to news articles that reference companies in the stock market.

Furthermore, users can easily exclude specific categories that shouldn’t be included in the Google News XML sitemap and can select and disable them after certain post types are enabled.

Overall, the Yoast News SEO plugin helps publishers to optimize their news content and meet the technical requirements for Google News while allowing them to focus on creating high-quality news articles.