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.

The sitemap generator will automatically follow the Google news sitemap protocol when using the Google news sitemap preset. However, there are still places where you will need to make sure your website is compatible with the news sitemap specifications:

• URL limit:
  • Max 1000 URLs per Google news sitemap file. If necessary, multiple sitemap files will automatically be generated including a sitemap index file.
• News publication age:
  • Google news sitemaps only accepts URLs that are max 2 days old. Prior to November 2009 this was max 3 days.
  • To make this work in sitemap generator, you must ensure your news page URLs output correct last modified values in either HTTP headers or META tags.
• News language:
  • You must ensure your news page URLs output correct language values.
  • In addition you can set Keyword tools | Content keyword analysis | Select stop words to match the main language of your website or select auto if your website uses multiple languages.
• News publisher:
  • 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 found your publisher identification name this, you can set the value in sitemapper options:
    
    

You can also check the official Google news sitemaps specifications. Remember: A1 Sitemap Generator Allows you to change option values manually if Google suddenly changes specifications.

To make a Google news sitemap, make sure to select the correct option before building the XML sitemap:



For best results, you can automate creating sitemaps with command line 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>