News Sitemap

A Google News sitemap is a specific type of XML sitemap that allows you to control the content you submit to Google News. Think of it as an index or a table of contents for the news pages you wish Google to crawl.

Typically, a Google News sitemap is hosted on the page’s root directory; however, you can also put it in subdirectories and subdomains, based on the structure of your site and the elements it contains.

The subsequent sections in this module will further explain the importance of a Google News sitemap, how to implement it, the best practices to do so, and the common mistakes to avoid.

2.4.2 Why Is a Google News Sitemap Important?

A well-defined Google News sitemap helps Google to find and crawl all news on your site more easily. Furthermore, it acts as a beacon directing web crawlers toward the pages, articles, videos and other content that you wish to highlight. On the other hand, it can also be used to prevent Google from indexing and crawling through specific content by excluding it from the sitemap.

The date of the article’s publication, its title, frequency of update, availability in other languages and other individual tags help Googlebot classify the articles on your website and make them more easily discoverable for readers.

Google News sitemaps are recommended for sites that want Google News to crawl and index new articles more quickly as well as discover the full extent of their news coverage.

2.4.3 Challenges Publishers Face With Sitemaps

So, considering the clear impact that a sitemap can make, why don’t all publishers make use of it?

Well, you may not need a sitemap if your site:

• Is quite small (generally defined as less than 500 pages).

• Has properly indexed and well-linked pages that Google can easily crawl through.

• Does not have media files, news clips and related articles.

Sites that don’t fit in the aforementioned categories should have a sitemap. However, there are some challenges that publishers may face when building a sitemap. Knowing them can help you overcome them with ease.

Here are the two most common issues:

• Large or complicated structure: A Google News sitemap needs to have less than 1,000 URLs. If you have a large collection of pages and archives on your news site, then we recommend splitting up the sitemap into smaller ones and using a sitemap index file to anchor them.Furthermore, to avoid indexation issues and to aid in troubleshooting, sitemaps should be built logically. Check out the example of the Boss Hunting site in Section 2.4.8 to understand how sitemaps should tag different sections, categories, etc.

• Missing <publication> tag: Every URL in your Google News sitemap must have a <publication> tag . For more about the necessary URL tags please review section 2.4.5.

2.4.4 Do Google News Sitemaps Matter for SEO?

Yes, they do. While Google says Google News sitemaps won’t improve rankings and don’t guarantee that all the items will be picked up by its bot in the way you intended, it’s an important step to improving discoverability.

Google News sitemaps aid with the speed of discovery and ease of navigability. But there’s more to it than that. Ultimately, it’s always better to provide Google with the best and most accurate information possible rather than leaving it up to the algorithm’s interpretation.

For actual improvement in rankings you need to focus on the relevance and prominence of the content, originality, expertise offered, keywords and the timeliness of the news published.

2.4.5 Designing Your Google News Sitemap

The XML file that functions as a Google News sitemap should clearly communicate with news search bots, provide them with the relevant information and encourage them to direct the reader to your page.

To achieve this, each article page must have the following XML tags:

• <publication>
  This tag has child-tags — name and language. Refer to The Guardian’s sitemap in Section 2.4.8 to see how it’s done. In that example, you can see that The Guardian has been specified as the publication name and that the language is English (EN).

• <publication_date>
  The article’s publication date is added in the W3C format, with predefined format options for you to choose from.

• title
  The heading of the published article to be displayed in the SERPs. Owing to space constraints, Google may not display anything longer than 70 characters.Ensure the title matches the article’s headline, to avoid Google changing it. That’s why you should avoid adding details such as the author’s name or the publication’s name under the title tag in the XML sitemap.

• A unique URL
  Google News can’t include pages that display multiple articles under one URL. Therefore, always add a unique URL for higher discoverability.

Find out more about specific tag definitions and their syntax here. For more on how the use of specific HTML elements can improve SEO, see our detailed course module on design and layout.

2.4.6 How to Create a Google News XML Sitemap

A Google News sitemap uses the Sitemap protocols set by Sitemaps.org and agreed upon by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. While Google allows you to create sitemaps in different formats such as XML, RSS, and even text, XML is the most popular and convenient format.

Here is how a typical, XML-based Google News sitemap should look like:

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If you have a handful of URLs (10-20) to add to your sitemap, you can manually create it using a basic text editing application like Notepad (for Windows) or Nano (for MacOS). However, a typical Google News sitemap is likely to have several URLs that need to be included in it.

Doing it manually can be quite cumbersome and we’d recommend either consulting your web developer or using a sitemap-generation tool. We’ve listed a few approaches to this below.

Standalone Options

A1 Sitemap Generator

Microsys’ A1 Sitemap Generator is a paid standalone software solution that can be used to create Google News sitemaps.

You can use the tool to crawl your entire website to create a list of pages before then using its automated XML sitemap builder to create your Google News sitemap.

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The tool can even be set up to create sitemaps twice a day.

Unlimited Sitemap Generator

XML-Sitemaps.com offers three different sitemap generators, depending on the publisher’s needs.

The free Online Generator is for smaller websites with 500 pages or less, while the PRO Sitemaps is the paid version that scales up to 1.5 million pages. The next step up is the Unlimited Sitemap Generator, which is a PHP script designed for server-side installation.

It’s this third option that we’re interested in, as it offers a paid add-on that will automatically track changes to your site and create news sitemaps.

WordPress Options

If you use WordPress as your preferred CMS, there are a number of XML sitemap generator plugins available.

Yoast SEO is a popular third-party plug-in with XML sitemap generator feature. Yoast offers the ability to seamlessly create a sitemap without having to leave your WordPress site. Apart from the convenience, a vital benefit that the plug-in provides is that it’s able to communicate with Google in near real-time and inform Google News crawler regarding the publication of a new post or an update to an existing one. Here’s how you can use Yoast SEO to create a Google News sitemap.

• Once you’re logged in to your site, simply navigate through this path by clicking on each of the menu items – Dashboard > SEO > News SEO.
• Here you’ll see the following settings:

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• Once here, enter the name of your publication exactly as it appears in your stories that are featured in news.google.com.

• Finally, select from the list of post tags and categories on your site that actually contain news and these will then be included in the Google News sitemap.

How to Submit a Google News Sitemap in GSC

The Google Search Console (GSC) serves many purposes such as checking the indexing status of your site, making it faster to crawl and discover and checking for any post-submission errors.

To submit your sitemap to GSC follow the steps below:

1. Log in to GSC

2. Select your website

3. Click on “Sitemaps” located in the “Index” pane

4. Click on “Add a new sitemap” and enter the complete URL of the sitemap

5. Submit

Here are a few notable points to keep in mind while submitting your sitemap.

• If you have created multiple sitemaps, anchor them through a sitemap index file and only submit that.

• Make sure you have owner access to the site and your sitemap is accessible to the search bots.

• As a good practice, regularly check your sitemap’s validity and visibility.

• While submitting a new or updated sitemap check for and remove any older or outdated versions.

• When submitting a sitemap add the <lastmod> or <updated> field, depending on the type of XML file being used, to inform the crawler about sitemap updates. As mentioned earlier, tools and plug-ins are able to do this automatically, with minimal intervention from your side.

You can know more about the steps involved in building and submitting a Google News sitemap here.

How to Use Robots.txt to Submit a Sitemap

The next method involves inserting a dedicated path to your sitemap in the robots.txt file.

The path should be structured as follows:

• Sitemap: https://example.com/my_sitemap.xml

Google will find the sitemap next time it crawls the file.

How to Ping Your Google News Sitemap

Publishers can also ping new and updated sitemaps by sending a GET request in either their browser or command line that specifies the full URL of the sitemap.

The GET request should be structured as follows:

• https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=FULL_URL_OF_SITEMAP

It’s important to note that Google Search Advocate John Mueller has said its “good practice” to use this process to ping updated sitemaps to have new content indexed quickly.

2.4.7 Avoid These Common Pitfalls

Here’s a handy list of Dos & Don’ts to avoid the common mistakes that publishers tend to make when building a new sitemap:

• Don’t include articles that were published more than 48 hours ago. Any article older than 48 hours must be removed from the sitemap.

• Only include news articles that pass Google’s content guidelines.

• Understand that Google News sitemaps are different from regular sitemaps. While in a regular sitemap you can include up to 50K URLs, in a Google News sitemap this is capped at 1,000 URLs

• For larger sites, use a sitemap index file to include multiple sitemaps, as mentioned in Section 2.4.3.

• Instead of building a new sitemap for each newly published article, keep your Google News sitemap updated with the URLs of those articles, as long as they are within the prescribed limit.

• Use a simple URL structure. Descriptive and localized words are known to be the most effective. Avoid using non-ASCII characters in the URL. Instead, UTF-8 can be used, whenever applicable, for characters in other languages. For more on the importance of URLs to SEO, see our detailed module on site architecture.

• Ensure that Googlebot has the access to crawl your site.

• Submitting conflicting information can confuse the crawler. For example, if a date of publication or article update is different to the sitemap’s date, this can confuse the crawler. This will result in your updated page likely being ignored.

2.4.8 Examples of Google News Sitemaps Done Well

Now that you’ve reviewed Google News sitemap concepts and best practices, let’s see the theory in action. Here are examples of two leading publications that put most of the aforementioned into practice.

The Guardian

The Guardian is a leading UK daily that has been in continuous circulation for almost two centuries. Here’s a snapshot of The Guardian’s Google News sitemap:

As you can see, the XML scripting goes well beyond the suggested recommendations. The sitemap clearly indicates:

• It’s a live coverage (ongoing coverage) article

• The language is English (iEN-UK)

• The article’s update frequency is hourly

• The publication date

• The publication’s title

• The keywords used within

This detailed information sends the proper signals to Google as to how frequently it should recrawl the article.

Boss Hunting

Boss Hunting is a popular Australian men’s magazine targeting the male demographic in the 18-40 age bracket. To overcome the challenges associated with a site that has a large number of articles and archives (as mentioned in Section 2.4.3), the publishers make use of sitemap index files.

Here’s what Boss Hunting’s sitemap index file looks like.

When you click on one of the index files (for example – category-sitemap) it will show you the list of all URLs (for various categories) that are a part of it, as seen in the image below.

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Using logically created index files, simplistic URLs that convey the necessary information, and adding the date of modification of the article helps Googlebot to navigate through the various subpages and articles within the site. This XML index file has been built via the Yoast News XML plugin.

2.4.9 Actions and Takeaways

You should now be able to see the value and significance of a sitemap on your news site. While there is a formally prescribed format for creating a sitemap, there is no single way to get it right.

You have the flexibility and freedom to choose the tags and metadata that you wish Google to index. You can even choose to use WordPress SEO plugins such as Yoast and RankMath that can automatically build it for you, thereby allowing Google to locate your page faster.