Google News Sitemaps with XML Sitemap Generator

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.

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. This makes it possible to limit the final sitemap output to certain paths.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

<?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>