Friday, May 06, 2022
Over the years, we introduced a number of tags and tag attributes for Google sitemap extensions,
specifically the Image and
Video extensions. Most of these tags
were added to allow site owners to deliver data more easily to Search.
Upon evaluating the value of the Google sitemap extension tags, we decided to officially deprecate
some tags and attributes, and remove them from our documentation. The deprecated tags will have no
effect on indexing and search features after August 6, 2022.
If you are a sitemap plugin developer or manage your own sitemaps, there’s no immediate action
required; you can leave these tags and attributes in place without drawbacks. In the future,
Search Console may show warnings once these updates are included in the next schema versions of
the Image and
Video extensions.
The following tags and attributes are affected:
| Sitemap extension | Deprecated XML tag or attribute | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Image sitemap | caption | Follow our images best practices. |
geo_location | ||
title | ||
license | ||
| Video sitemap | category | Follow our video best practices. |
player_loc[@allow_embed] | ||
player_loc[@autoplay] | ||
gallery_loc | ||
price[@all] | ||
tvshow[@all] |
By simplifying sitemap extensions, we hope you can also reduce complexity of your codebases, and
sitemaps will be less cluttered in general. If you have questions or comments, check out our
sitemaps documentation, or catch us on
Twitter or in the
Search Central forums.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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