If you are a news publisher, use news sitemaps to tell Google about your news articles and
additional information about them. You can either extend your existing sitemap with news
specific tags, or create a separate news sitemap that’s reserved just for your news articles.
Either option is fine with Google, however creating a separate sitemap just for your news
articles may enable better tracking of your content in Search in Search Console.
News sitemap best practices
News sitemaps are based on generic sitemaps, so the
general sitemap best practices
also apply to news sitemaps.
Update your news sitemap with fresh 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.
Only include recent 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 in your sitemap from the older URLs.
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
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 won’t cause any problems with
Google Search if the file is empty.
Example news sitemap
The following example shows a regular sitemap with news extension. It contains one
<url> tag and a single <news:news> tag with its required
child tags:
News sitemap reference
The news tags are defined in the news sitemap namespace:
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9
To make sure Google can use your news sitemap, you must use the following required tags:
| Required tags | |
|---|---|
<news:news> | The parent tag of other tags in the news: namespace. Each urlsitemap tag can have only one news:news tag (plus the respective closing tag)and a sitemap may have up to 1,000 news:news tags. If there are more than1,000 <news:news> tags in a news sitemap,split your sitemap into several smaller sitemaps. |
<news:publication> | The parent tag for the |
<news:name> | The |
<news:language> | The Exception: For Simplified Chinese, use |
<news:publication_date> | The article publication date in Google accepts any of the following formats:
|
<news:title> | The title of the news article. |
Troubleshooting sitemaps
If you’re having trouble with your sitemap, you can investigate the errors with Google Search Console.
See Search Console’s
sitemaps troubleshooting guide
for help.
Additional resources
Want to learn more? Check out the following resources:
How we apply this
News sitemaps have strict freshness rules and a two-day window. They are worth implementing only for clients publishing genuinely time-sensitive content, and they need monitoring rather than a one-off setup.
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