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.