Help for Publishers

We encourage using the Sitemap protocol, because it allows webmasters to provide additional information about pages on their sites. In addition, a sitemap based on this protocol can be used by all the major search engines, as the protocol is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.

When creating a News sitemap using the Sitemap protocol, please keep in mind:

• Make sure you include a second namespace in the News schema. Example: http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9
• The urlset tag for a News sitemap should look like this: <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

List of URLs

• Specify all URLs using the same syntax. For instance, include the protocol (such as http://) and all required trailing slashes. If you specify your site location as http://www.mysite.com/, your URL list shouldn't contain URLs that begin with http://mysite.com/. And if you specify your site location as http://mysite.com/, your URL list shouldn't contain URLs that begin with http://www.mysite.com/
• Don't include session IDs in URLs.
• The News sitemap URL needs to be encoded for readability by the web server where it's located. In addition, it can contain only ASCII characters. However, it can't use upper ASCII characters or certain control codes or special characters such as * and {}. If your Sitemap URL contains these characters, you'll receive an error when you try to add it. We do support the use of Punycode for encoding URLs.
• A News sitemap can contain no more than 1,000 URLs. If you want to include more, you can either break these into multiple sitemaps or create a sitemap index file to manage them. Use the XML format provided in the Sitemap protocol. Your sitemap index file shouldn't list more than 1,000 sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server isn't overloaded by serving large files to Google News.

Publication date

• Each URL needs to include the article publication date in W3C format, preferably including a timestamp. If you don't include this field in your sitemap file, the page itself should have an extractable date. Note: Please provide us with the date when the article first appeared on your site. If the file doesn't include a date for the article, and the article itself doesn't have an extractable date, the article won't be included in Google News, and you'll see a "Date not found" error for the article on the News crawler.

News-specific tags (optional) Each URL may include the following tags within the News schema:

• A comma-separated list of keywords describing the content of the article. Keywords may be drawn from, but aren't limited to the list of existing Google News categories
• A comma-separated list of stock tickers of the companies, mutual funds, or other financial entities that are the main subject of the article. This is relevant primarily for business articles. Each ticker may optionally be prefixed by the name of its stock exchange, e.g., "NYSE:HD."

Example of a News sitemap containing a single article:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://example.com/article123.html</loc>
      <news:news>
         <news:publication_date> 2006-08-14T03:30:00Z </news:publication_date>
         <news:keywords>Business, Mergers, Acquisitions</news:keywords>
         <news:stock_tickers>MSFT, NYSE:HD</news:stock_tickers>
      </news:news>
   </url>
</urlset>

Once you've assembled your news articles for a single publication label, upload them to the highest-level directory that contains them, then select Add Google News sitemaps. Be sure to use your Webmaster Tools Account, as shown in the screenshot below.



Google News can also accept sitemaps created in other formats. To learn more about creating Google sitemaps files, please visit our Webmaster Tools Help Center.