Google News sitemaps

When you create a Google News sitemap, follow these requirements:

  • Only include URLs for articles that were published 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 from the older URLs. The articles will remain in the index for the regular 30-day period.
  • Update your News sitemap with new articles as they're published. Google News crawls News sitemaps as often as it crawls the rest of your site.
  • You can add up to 1,000 URLs in a News sitemap. If there are more than 1,000 URLs in a News sitemap, break your sitemap into several smaller sitemaps, and use a sitemap index file to manage them defined in the sitemap protocol. Since News sitemaps are crawled more often than web sitemaps, this limit ensures that your site isn't unnecessarily overloaded.
  • Update your current sitemap with your new article URLs. Don't create a new sitemap with each update.

Example sitemap entry

A Google News sitemap uses the sitemap protocol. Here's an example of a News sitemap entry: 

<?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>

Sites with a News sitemap aren't favored in ranking results. Google News uses normal crawl methods to search and label the homepages and sections of all news sites, regardless of the availability of a News sitemap.

Submit your sitemap

After you've created your News sitemap, submit it through Search Console. We recommend that you upload your sitemap to the directory that contains your news articles or a directory closer to the root of your site. For more information, learn how to manage sitemaps.

News-specific tag definitions

Review the following Google News tags for sitemaps:

Tag Required? Description
<publication> Yes

The publication where the article appears. It has two required child tags: <name> and <language>.
The <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, except for anything in parentheses.

The <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.

<publication_date> Yes

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 published on your site. Don't specify the time when you added the article to your sitemap.

The Google News crawler 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)
<title> Yes

The title of the news article.