How to Create a Google News Sitemap for Your Website
Publishing news content on your website is only half the battle. Getting that content discovered quickly by Google News requires a specialized approach—one that goes beyond traditional XML sitemaps.
A Google News Sitemap serves as a direct pipeline between your newsroom and Google’s news crawlers, ensuring your articles appear in Google News results when they’re most relevant.
Understanding Google News Sitemaps
A Google News Sitemap is a specialized XML file that tells Google about your news content specifically. While regular sitemaps catalog all pages on your website, a News Sitemap focuses exclusively on articles published within the last two days.
This narrow time window reflects the nature of news itself: timeliness matters, and Google News prioritizes fresh content.
The distinction matters because Google News operates on a different crawling schedule than standard web search. News crawlers check your sitemap frequently—sometimes every few minutes—looking for breaking stories and updates.
By providing a dedicated News Sitemap, you’re essentially raising your hand and saying, “Here’s our latest journalism, and here’s why it matters.”
Why Your News Site Needs a Dedicated Sitemap
Speed is everything in news publishing. When a story breaks, you want it indexed within minutes, not hours. A properly configured Google News Sitemap dramatically reduces the time between publication and appearance in Google News results.
This advantage compounds during major news events when being first can drive significant traffic.
Beyond speed, News Sitemaps give you control over how Google interprets your content. You can specify publication dates with precision, declare the language of each article, indicate which URLs contain news versus evergreen content, and even provide access to paywalled articles for limited preview in search results.
Technical Requirements and Specifications
Creating a Google News Sitemap requires adhering to a specific XML structure. The file begins with standard XML namespace declarations, but includes the Google News namespace that enables news-specific tags.
Each URL entry in your sitemap must include not just the article location, but also metadata wrapped in news-specific tags.
At minimum, each article entry needs a publication date, article title, and publication name. The publication date must be in W3C format, including the timezone.
The title should match your article’s headline, and the publication name must exactly match what you’ve registered with Google News. Even small discrepancies can cause indexing issues.
Your News Sitemap can contain up to 1,000 URLs. If you publish more than 1,000 articles in two days—a scenario only the largest news organizations face—you’ll need multiple sitemaps referenced through a sitemap index file.
For most publishers, a single sitemap suffices, automatically rotating older articles out as new ones are added.
Creating Your Sitemap Manually
For small news sites or those just getting started, creating a News Sitemap manually provides insight into the structure. Start with a text editor and build the XML framework.
Your opening tags declare this as both a standard sitemap and a Google News sitemap by referencing both namespaces.
Within the sitemap, each article becomes a URL entry. Inside that entry, you nest the news-specific information within publication tags. The publication name goes in one tag, while article metadata—including the publication date and title—goes in another.
Pay careful attention to proper XML escaping, especially in article titles that might contain ampersands, quotes, or other special characters.
Once you’ve structured a few entries manually, the pattern becomes clear. The challenge with manual creation is maintenance. News sites publish constantly, and manually updating your sitemap becomes impractical quickly. This is where automation enters the picture.
Automating Sitemap Generation
Most modern content management systems can generate News Sitemaps automatically through plugins or built-in functionality. WordPress users have several plugin options that dynamically generate News Sitemaps, pulling from your most recent posts and formatting them correctly without manual intervention.
For custom-built news sites, you’ll likely need to implement sitemap generation programmatically.
The logic is straightforward: query your database for articles published within the last 48 hours, loop through the results, and output properly formatted XML. Many web frameworks offer XML generation libraries that handle proper escaping and structure.
The key advantage of automation is accuracy. Your sitemap updates every time you publish, ensuring Google News always has access to your latest content.
You can also implement logic to exclude certain categories or tags, preventing non-news content from appearing in your News Sitemap even if it appears on your site.
Submitting Your Sitemap to Google
Creating the sitemap is only the first step. You need to tell Google where to find it. The standard approach is adding your News Sitemap location to your robots.txt file. This allows Google’s news crawlers to discover the sitemap automatically without requiring manual submission.
Additionally, submit your sitemap through Google Search Console. Navigate to the Sitemaps section, enter your News Sitemap URL, and submit it.
Search Console will then show you indexing statistics, error reports, and warnings about any issues Google encounters while processing your sitemap.
Keep your sitemap URL consistent and predictable. Many publishers use paths like /news-sitemap.xml or /sitemap-news.xml. Once you’ve established a location, avoid changing it unless absolutely necessary, as this can temporarily disrupt Google’s access to your latest content.
Validating and Testing Your Sitemap
Before relying on your News Sitemap, validate it thoroughly. Several online XML validators can check basic syntax errors, but you’ll also want to verify compliance with Google’s specific requirements.
Search Console’s coverage report reveals whether Google successfully processed your sitemap and indexed the included URLs.
Common issues include incorrect date formats, mismatched publication names, or XML structure problems. If Google reports errors, address them promptly. Even a single malformed entry can cause Google to reject your entire sitemap, preventing any of your content from being indexed through this channel.
Test by publishing a new article and checking how quickly it appears in your sitemap. Then monitor Search Console to see how long Google takes to discover and index it. This feedback loop helps you optimize both your sitemap generation and your publishing workflow.
Best Practices for Long-Term Success
Maintain consistency in your publication name across your sitemap and Google News Publisher Center registration. Variations or typos prevent Google from associating your content with your registered news source, effectively rendering your sitemap useless.
Only include genuine news content in your News Sitemap. Blogs, opinion pieces, and evergreen content belong in your regular sitemap, not your News Sitemap.
Google expects News Sitemaps to contain time-sensitive journalism, and diluting your sitemap with other content types can harm your overall news indexing.
Monitor your sitemap’s performance regularly through Search Console. Watch for coverage drops, error spikes, or unusual patterns that might indicate technical issues. Set up alerts so you’re notified immediately if Google stops successfully processing your sitemap.
Finally, keep your sitemap lean and focused. While you can include articles up to two days old, some publishers find success focusing on just the most recent 24 hours or even 12 hours of content. This ensures your News Sitemap consistently features only your freshest, most timely journalism.
Moving Forward
A well-implemented Google News Sitemap serves as critical infrastructure for any news publisher serious about search visibility. The initial setup requires attention to technical detail, but once running, an automated system operates invisibly in the background, ensuring your journalism reaches readers the moment it’s published.
In the competitive landscape of digital news, those minutes matter—and a properly configured News Sitemap helps ensure you don’t lose them.