Before you begin, ensure that your site is included in Google News. If it's not, you can contact us to request inclusion.
A News Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, with additional News-specific tags as defined below. Here is an example of a News Sitemap entry using News-specific tags:
<?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:access>Subscription</news:access>
<news:genres>PressRelease, Blog</news:genres>
<news:publication_date>2008-12-23</news:publication_date>
<news:title>Companies A, B in Merger Talks</news:title>
<news:keywords>business, merger, acquisition, A, B</news:keywords>
<news:stock_tickers>NASDAQ:A, NASDAQ:B</news:stock_tickers>
</news:news>
</url>
</urlset>
News-specific tag definitions
| Tag | Required? | Description |
|---|---|---|
<publication> |
Yes | The <publication> tag specifies the publication in which the article appears. It has two required child tags: <name> and <language>. The <name> is the name of the news publication. It must exactly match the name as it appears on your articles in news.google.com, omitting any trailing parentheticals. For example, if the name appears in Google News as "The Example Times (subscription)", you should use the name, "The Example Times". The <language> is the language of your publication. It should be an ISO 639 Language Code (either 2 or 3 letters). Exception: For Chinese, please use zh-cn for Simplified Chinese or zh-tw for Traditional Chinese. |
<access> |
Yes, if access is not open, else should be omitted | Possible values include "Subscription" or "Registration", describing the accessibility of the article. If the article is accessible to Google News readers without a registration or subscription, this tag should be omitted. |
<genres> |
Yes, if genres apply, else can be omitted | A comma-separated list of properties characterizing the content of the article, such as "PressRelease" or "UserGenerated." See Google News content properties for a list of possible values. Your content must be labeled accurately, in order to provide a consistent experience for our users. |
<publication_date> |
Yes |
Article publication date in W3C format, using either the "complete date" format (YYYY-MM-DD) or the "complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds" format with time zone designator (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD) format. Please ensure that you give the original date and time at which the article was published on your site; do not give the time at which the article was added to your Sitemap. Our crawler would accept any of the formats below: |
<title> |
No, but strongly recommended | The title of the news article. Note: The title may be truncated for space reasons when shown on Google News. Article title tags should only include the title of the article as it appears on your site. Please make sure not to include the author name, the publication name, or publication date as part of the title tag. |
<keywords> |
No | A comma-separated list of keywords describing the topic of the article. Keywords may be drawn from, but are not limited to, the list of existing Google News keywords. |
<stock_tickers> |
No | A comma-separated list of up to 5 stock tickers of the companies, mutual funds, or other financial entities that are the main subject of the article. Relevant primarily for business articles. Each ticker must be prefixed by the name of its stock exchange, and must match its entry in Google Finance. For example, "NASDAQ:AMAT" (but not "NASD:AMAT"), or "BOM:500325" (but not "BOM:RIL"). |
When creating your News Sitemap, please keep in mind the following:
- Your News Sitemap should contain only URLs for your articles published in the last two days.
- You're encouraged to update your News Sitemap continually with fresh articles as they're published. Google News crawls News Sitemaps as often as it crawls the rest of your site.
- A News Sitemap can contain no more than 1,000 URLs. If you want to include more, you can break these URLs into multiple Sitemaps, and use 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 50,000 Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server isn't overloaded by serving large files to Google News.
Once you've created your Sitemap, upload it to the highest-level directory that contains your news articles. Please see this page for further instructions on submitting your Sitemap.
