Why do you create Sitemaps for Google?

Content Sitemap

<url>
<loc>http://localhost:33100/www/example-page</loc>
<lastmod>2009-12-01T13:08:06Z</lastmod>
</url>

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.

Old News Sitemap

Example of Old News Sitemap (generated by qPloneGoogleSitemaps 0.8.5) looks like this:

It consists of number of URL blocks (within <url> </ulr> tags) each including:

• <loc>...</loc> - location info
• <news:news>...</news:news> - newsitem-specific tags:
  • <news:publication_date>...</news:publication_date>
  • <news:keywords>...</news:keywords>

<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/>
</news:news>
</url>
<url>
...
</url>
</urlset>

New News Sitemap

New News Sitemap should now look like this (example taken from ​here):

<?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://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>

Old News Sitemaps vs New News Sitemaps

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:

• Publication tags (<n:publication>...</n:publication>) - include two child tags name and language which should be added to each of your Sitemap’s news articles.
  • <n:name>...</n:name>
  • <n:language>...</n:language>

• Title tags (<n:title>...</n:title>) - article titles can be added using the title tag to help us identify the correct title for your articles.
• Genres tags (<n:genres>...</n:genres>) -helps identify the different types of content within your articles, such as PressRelease?, OpEd?, Blog or UserGenerated?.
• Access tags (<n:access>...</n:access>) - tell us about the access level of your articles, whether they’re under a subscription wall, or free.

Більше про нові обвязкові теги тут: ​http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74288