Google News Stopped Indexing Your Sitemap?

UPDATE: This just in from Chris Andrews, one of the top contributors to the Google News Help Forum

“Google News is working on a system-wide fix for the ‘not in the Google News database‘ error-message error.

Nothing is being done on an individual site basis, so publishers do not need to post their sites in the Google News Help Forum. It is already a known issue that is being worked on.

Also, this error is not having an effect on the crawling of news-sitemaps that are actually in the database. The crawling and indexing is continuing as normal.

This issue is expected to be resolved by Tuesday next week (6/25/2013). Publishers that continue to see this error after that point may ask for assistance or seek updated information in the forum or by using the Google News Publisher report an issue form.”

Over the past few days I have been contacted by several Google News publishers who have received the following message in their Google Webmaster Tools News Sitemaps Report and have noticed a problem with Google News not indexing their site:

“Your Sitemap is on a site that is not in the Google News database. Google News can only accept Sitemaps from sites that we crawl. If your site is crawled by Google News, please check that the URL of your Sitemap agrees with the URLs of your articles as they appear on Google News, including any leading “www”. If you would like to request inclusion of your site in Google News, please contact the Google News support team.”

This message has typically coincided with the publisher’s site either not showing up in Google News’ index or with much slower indexing of newly published articles.  Not fun.

The good news is that this appears to be a glitch on Google News’ part.  If you have received this notice and Google News is not indexing your Google News XML Sitemap, I recommend you head over to the Google News Publishers Help Forum and post there about your issue.  Thus far the Google News team has responded pretty quickly to these issues and fixed the problem.  It’s not clear why they haven’t done this yet for all sites, but the sooner you alert them to your site’s issue, the sooner it may get taken care of.

Note to Christian Bale’s agent: No more musicals