Google News Sitemaps

You’ve all seen Google news results when searching online. But did you know those results come from, in part, user submitted XML sitemaps? Google allows you to submit XML sitemaps to its news feed in the same way you can submit an XML sitemap of your website to Google Webmaster Tools. The sitemap works in the same way for both: it allows Google to discover your pages and index them faster and more accurately. The sitemaps also allow you to use metadata to better describe the pages for indexing.

Google is currently in a six month transition making changes to the way Google news sitemaps are to be constructed. While in the past, news sitemaps needed to be divided into separate maps according to genres and languages, now all articles can be combined into one single sitemap. It is also possible to note your news sitemap location in your robots.txt file where as before your news sitemap would have needed to be uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools.

You will want to update your sitemap every time you publish a new article. Remember to only include articles published in the last two days in your news sitemap. You can have a maximum of 1,000 URLs in a sitemap. On the technical side of things, Google uses Sitemap Protocol 0.9. For a complete list of news sitemap tags, visit Google Webmaster Central.