News Sitemap

Google News Sitemap - allows you to control which content you submit to Google News. By creating and submitting a Google News Sitemap, you're able to help Google News discover and crawl your site's articles. News Sitemap is different from regular Sitemap, because the nature of news sites is that they change very often and need to be crawled and indexed much more frequently. News Sitemaps let Google know when new articles have been posted and are available for crawling and indexing. Especially recommended for new websites, with dynamic content, with few links to it or requires users to follow several links to reach your news content.

News Sitemaps are specific to Google News. News Sitemap content is very dynamic - as soon as new items are published - they are added to this sitemap and previous ones are excluded. News Sitemap lists only news articles which have been published on your site within the past two days. Older articles are not allowed. A News Sitemap must contain a publication date for each article, which refers to the date that the article first appears on your site.

New News Sitemap

According to the new News Sitemap specifications ​http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74288 New News Sitemap should now have more tags to each entry to provide more information about individual articles. New News Sitemap looks like this:

<urlset>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.org/business/article55.html</loc>
    <n:news>
      <n:publication>
        <n:name>The Example Times</n:name>
        <n:language>en</n:language>
      </n:publication>
      <n:access>subscription</n:access>
      <n:genres>pressrelease, blog</n:genres>
      <n:publication_date>2008-12-23</n:publication_date>
      <n:title>Companies A, B in Merger Talks</n:title>
      <n:keywords>business, merger, acquisition, A, B</n:keywords>
      <n:stock_tickers>NASDAQ:A, NASDAQ:B</n:stock_tickers>
    </n:news>
  </url>
</urlset>

The new updated format allows you to add new tags to each entry in your Sitemap, to provide more information about individual articles. So, the differences between old and new News Sitemap format include:

New Required Tags

• Publication tags (<n:publication>) - include two child tags name and language which should be added to each of your Sitemap’s news articles.
  • <n:name>. - is the name of the news publication
  • <n:language> - is the language of your publication
• Title tags (<n:title>) - article titles can be added using the title tag to help us identify the correct title for your articles.
• Publication date (<news:publication_date>) - article publication date in W3C format. This tag remains the same as in old news sitemap format.

Half-required Tags

More about ​access and genres tags.

Values for the tags <access> and <genres> are required when applicable and restricted to the list provided below. These values can be in English only. Google system will automatically display the visible designations in your site's language when displaying your articles on Google News.

• Genres tags (<n:genres>) -helps identify the different types of content within your articles, such as PressRelease, OpEd, Blog or UserGenerated. This is a required tag if genres apply, otherwise it can be omitted. The <genres> tag takes one or more of the following values, separated by commas:
  • PressRelease (visible): an official press release.
  • Satire (visible): an article which ridicules its subject for didactic purposes.
  • Blog (visible): any article published on a blog, or in a blog format.
  • OpEd: an opinion-based article which comes specifically from the Op-Ed section of your site.
  • Opinion: any other opinion-based article not appearing on an Op-Ed page, i.e., reviews, interviews, etc.
  • UserGenerated: newsworthy user-generated content which has already gone through a formal editorial review process on your site.

• Access tags (<n:access>) - tell us about the access level of your articles, whether they’re under a subscription or free. This is a required tag if access is not open, otherwise it should be omitted. The <access> tag takes one of the following values:
  • Subscription (visible): an article which prompts users to pay to view content.
  • Registration (visible): an article which prompts users to sign up for an unpaid account to view content. Omitting the <access> tag means that the full article is accessible to all users for at least thirty days.

Not Required Tags

• Keywords tags (<news:keywords>) - A comma-separated list of keywords describing the topic of the article.
• Stock Tickers (<stock_tickers>) - 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.

Old News Sitemap

Example of Old News Sitemap (generated by ​qPloneGoogleSitemaps =< 1.1.2) looks like this:

It consists of number of URL blocks (within <url> </ulr> tags) each including such newsitem-specific tags as <news:publication_date> (required) and <news:keywords> (not required).

<urlset>
<url>
<loc>http://localhost:33100/www/news-items/test-page</loc>
−
<news:news>
<news:publication_date>2010-01-12T14:32:47Z</news:publication_date>
<news:keywords>town, flower, plone</news:keywords>
</news:news>
</url>
<url>
...
</url>
</urlset>