How do you create a Google News sitemap?

Why should you create a Google News sitemap?

A news sitemap tells search engines about your recent news articles and helps Google News discover and crawl your content faster. Google Publisher Center Help explains that publishers do not need to submit their site to be eligible to show content on Google News surfaces. Google algorithmically discovers news content through Search technologies, provided your site complies with Google content policies.

A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages and files on your site, as well as the relationships between them. Search engines read this file to crawl your site more efficiently. Creating a Google News sitemap gives you control over which content you submit, improves crawler discovery speed, and helps resolve indexing issues. While a sitemap helps search engines discover URLs, it does not guarantee that every submitted item will be crawled and indexed.

What formatting rules apply to a Google News sitemap?

Google Search Central documents that you can either extend your existing sitemap with news tags or create a separate news sitemap reserved strictly for news articles. If you already have a website sitemap, creating a separate sitemap for news content is recommended. You must only include URLs for articles that were created in the last two days.

Once articles become older than two days, you must either remove those URLs from the news sitemap or remove the news metadata tags from the older URLs. Each url sitemap tag can contain only one news tag, and a single news sitemap file may have up to 1,000 news tags. In addition, all sitemap formats limit a single file to 50MB uncompressed or 50,000 URLs.

Each entry in a news sitemap must contain specific metadata tags. You must supply the publication name using the news name tag and include the original date and time when the article was first published using the publication date tag formatted in W3C format. Google Search Console documentation notes that every URL entry in a news sitemap must also include a publication tag.

What on-page requirements must your articles meet?

Your news article pages must display accurate on-page timing details that match the metadata in your sitemap. Google Publisher Center Help specifies that to be considered in Google News, articles need to show both a clear, visible date and time on the page.

To make sure Google has the correct information for your published articles, update your structured data markup on the page. The publication date listed in the news sitemap entry must match the article publication date on the page and use W3C format.

How do you submit and monitor your news sitemap?

You submit your news sitemap to Google using the Sitemaps report in Search Console. You can host your sitemap anywhere on your site, but unless you submit it directly through Search Console, a sitemap affects only descendants of its parent directory. Make sure you include the specific URLs in your sitemap that you want to see in search results.

1. 01Verify that your user account has owner permissions on your Search Console property, which is required to submit sitemaps.
2. 02Place your sitemap XML file on your server, ensuring all article URLs listed were published within the last two days.
3. 03Navigate to the Sitemaps report in Search Console and enter the relative path of your news sitemap file to submit it.
4. 04Check back periodically in Search Console to confirm whether Google can fetch and process the sitemap without encountering parsing errors such as a missing publication tag.

Common questions