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News sitemaps
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.
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:
<?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>
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 url
sitemap 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 than
1,000 <news:news> tags in a news sitemap,
split your sitemap into several smaller sitemaps.
<news:publication>
The parent tag for the <news:name> and
<news:language> tags. Each <news:news> parent tag
may only have one <news:publication> tag.
<news:name>
The <news:name> tag is the name of the news publication. It must
exactly match the name as it appears on your articles on
news.google.com, omitting
anything in parentheses.
<news:language>
The <news:language> tag is the language of your publication. Use an
ISO 639 language code
(two or three letters).
Exception: For Simplified Chinese, use zh-cn and for Traditional
Chinese, use zh-tw.
<news:publication_date>
The article publication date in
W3C format. Use
either the "complete date" format (YYYY-MM-DD) or the "complete date plus
hours, minutes, and seconds" format with time zone designator format
(YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD). Specify the original date and time when the
article was first published on your site. Don't specify the time when you added the
article to your sitemap.
Google accepts any of the following formats:
Complete date: YYYY-MM-DD (1997-07-16)
Complete date plus hours and minutes:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD (1997-07-16T19:20+01:00)
Complete date plus hours, minutes, and seconds:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD (1997-07-16T19:20:30+01:00)
Complete date plus hours, minutes, seconds, and a decimal fraction of a second:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sTZD (1997-07-16T19:20:30.45+01:00)
<news:title>
The title of the news article.
Additional resources
Want to learn more? Check out the following resources:
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-03-06 UTC."],[[["News sitemaps inform Google about your news articles and related details, helping with better tracking in Search Console."],["Sitemaps should be updated with fresh articles as they're published, keeping only articles from the last two days and removing older ones."],["Required tags for news sitemaps include `\u003cnews:news\u003e`, `\u003cnews:publication\u003e`, `\u003cnews:name\u003e`, `\u003cnews:language\u003e`, `\u003cnews:publication_date\u003e`, and `\u003cnews:title\u003e`."],["You can extend your existing sitemap or create a separate news sitemap, following general sitemap guidelines and news-specific tag requirements."],["An empty news sitemap won't negatively affect your site's performance on Google Search and may occur if no recent articles have been published."]]],["News publishers can use news sitemaps to inform Google about new articles. They can either add news-specific tags to existing sitemaps or create a separate news sitemap. Update the sitemap with new articles, and remove URLs of articles older than two days or remove the `\u003cnews:news\u003e` tag. Required tags include `\u003cnews:news\u003e`, `\u003cnews:publication\u003e`, `\u003cnews:name\u003e`, `\u003cnews:language\u003e`, `\u003cnews:publication_date\u003e`, and `\u003cnews:title\u003e`, each with specific formatting and content requirements.\n"]]
