Google News sitemaps
When you create a Google News sitemap, follow these requirements:
-
Only include new URLs for articles that were created in the last two days. Once the articles are older than two days, either remove those URLs from the News sitemap or remove the
<news:news>
metadata from the older URLs. The articles will remain in the index for the regular 30-day period.If you choose the method of removing old URLs from your News sitemap, this could mean that your sitemap becomes empty for a period of time (for example, if you haven't published new articles in the last few days). You may see an Empty Sitemap warning in Search Console, but this is just to make sure it was intentional on your behalf. It will not cause any problems with Google Search if the file is empty.
- Update your News sitemap with new articles as they're published. Don't create a new sitemap with each update. Google News crawls News sitemaps as often as it crawls the rest of your site.
-
You can add up to 1,000
<url>
elements in a News sitemap. If there are more than 1,000<url>
elements in a News sitemap, break your sitemap into several smaller sitemaps, and use a sitemap index file to manage them as defined by the sitemap protocol. Since News sitemaps are crawled more often than web sitemaps, this limit ensures that your site isn't unnecessarily overloaded. - Our documentation on sitemaps also applies to the sitemap extensions. Make sure to follow general sitemap guidelines.
Example sitemap entry
A Google News sitemap uses the sitemap protocol. Here's an example of a News sitemap entry:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.example.org/business/article55.html</loc> <news:news> <news:publication> <news:name>The Example Times</news:name> <news:language>en</news:language> </news:publication> <news:publication_date>2008-12-23</news:publication_date> <news:title>Companies A, B in Merger Talks</news:title> </news:news> </url> </urlset>
Sites with a News sitemap aren't favored in ranking results. Google News uses normal crawl methods to search and label the homepages and sections of all news sites, regardless of the availability of a News sitemap.
Submit your sitemap
After you've created your News sitemap, submit it through Search Console. We recommend that you upload your sitemap to the directory that contains your news articles or a directory closer to the root of your site. For more information, learn how to manage sitemaps.
News-specific tag definitions
Review the following Google News tags for sitemaps:
Tag | Required? | Description |
---|---|---|
<publication> |
Yes |
The publication where the article appears. It has two required child tags:
The Exception: For Simplified Chinese, use |
<publication_date> |
Yes |
The article publication date in
W3C format. Use
either the "complete date" format ( The Google News crawler accepts any of the following formats:
|
<title> |
Yes |
The title of the news article. |