Create XML Sitemaps and Google News Sitemaps
Making Google news sitemaps is quite similar to creating normal XML sitemaps.
If you do not know how to make normal XML sitemaps, check our
xml sitemap generator tutorial.
Limit URLs in Sitemap Generator for XML News Sitemaps
Google news sitemaps can only contain news orientated URLs. It is therefore necessary to have
A1 Sitemap Generator crawl your website
in such a way that the output used for generated news sitemap only contains news stories.
You will need to configure
output filters.
filters. This makes it possible to limit the final sitemap output to certain paths.
Google News Sitemap File and URL Requirements
Our sitemap generator will automatically follow the Google news sitemap protocol including:
- Max 50000 URLs per Google news sitemap file. If necessary, multiple sitemap files will automatically be generated including a sitemap index file.
- Only include URLs that are max 2 days old in created XML sitemap files.
- Will automatically insert correct publication / language for each URL.
Prior to November 2009, the Google news sitemap requirements were:
- Max 1000 URLs per news sitemap file.
- URLs could max be 3 days old.
See below for an explanation of how URL/page
age
and language is determined by our sitemap generator.
News Sitemap Requirement: Correct URL/page Last Modified Value
You must ensure your news page URLs output correct
last modified values in
either HTTP headers or META tags.
This is used by our sitemap generator to determine which URLs are included in the generated Google news sitemap file.
News Sitemap Requirement: Correct URL/page Language
You must ensure your news page URLs output correct
language values.
This is used by our sitemap generator to determine howto markup included URLs in the generated Google news sitemap file.
News Sitemap Requirement: Sitemap Generator Options
You must set the publication name used for Google XML Sitemaps. To find it, either:
- Find what you chose as publisher name first time you submitted a news sitemap to Google.
- Search Google News for your articles to find the displayed publisher name for your news stories.
Having done this, you can set the options in:
Create Google News Sitemaps Variation of XML Sitemaps
To make a Google news sitemap, make sure to select the correct option before building the XML sitemap:
For best results, you can
automate our sitemap generator
to build your news sitemaps twice a day, e.g. morning and night.
Google News XML Sitemap Example
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:n="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/</loc>
<n:news>
<n:publication>
<n:name>News paper, blog or similar name</n:name>
<n:language>en</n:language>
</n:publication>
<n:publication_date>2008-12-30T00:00:00+00:00</n:publication_date>
<n:keywords>2008,news,xml,sitemap,example,keywords,generated</n:keywords>
<n:title>News Article Title</n:title>
</n:news>
</url>
</urlset>
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