How to Create a Google News Sitemap for Optimal Indexing

Creating a Google News sitemap is a strategic move for any website focused on news and current events. By following these detailed steps, you can ensure that your news content is not only indexed but also discovered by a wide audience. Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you achieve this:

Understand the Requirements

Your site must be included in Google News or eligible for inclusion. To get eligibility, your site should adhere to Google News content policies, which are designed to ensure that the content is relevant, fresh, and free of biases. Additionally, your news articles should be written in a way that is suitable for public consumption and should not contain any offensive or contraversial elements.

The sitemap you create must be in XML format and comply with Google’s News Sitemap guidelines. These guidelines are designed to ensure that the sitemap is well-structured and easy for Google to parse and index. By adhering to these guidelines, you can help improve the visibility of your news articles on Google News.

Create the Sitemap

Here’s a basic structure for a Google News sitemap:

urlset xmlns"" xmlns:news"">
  url>
    loc>>
    news:news>
      news:publication>
        news:name>Example News/news:name>
        news:language>en/news:language>
      /news:publication>
      news:publication_date>2024-08-14/news:publication_date>
      news:title>Title of the News Article/news:title>
    /news:news>
  /url>
  url>
    loc>>
    news:news>
      news:publication>
        news:name>Example News/news:name>
        news:language>en/news:language>
      /news:publication>
      news:publication_date>2024-08-14/news:publication_date>
      news:title>Another News Article Title/news:title>
    /news:news>
  /url>
/urlset>

Add Required Elements

Each url> entry in the sitemap should include:

loc: The URL of the news article. news:news: A container for news-specific information. news:publication: Contains the publication name and language. news:publication_date: The date the article was published in YYYY-MM-DD format. news:title: The title of the news article.

Host the Sitemap

Save the XML file and upload it to your websites root directory. For example, if your site uses a domain called , you would upload the sitemap to

Submit the Sitemap to Google

After hosting your sitemap, you need to submit it to Google:

Go to Google Search Console. Select your property. Navigate to the News Sitemaps section. Click on Add News Sitemap. Enter the URL of your sitemap and click Submit.

Monitor Performance

Regularly check Google Search Console for any errors or issues with your sitemap. Update the sitemap whenever you publish new articles, as Google recommends updating it frequently. This ensures that your new content is indexed as quickly as possible and remains visible in search results.

Additional Tips

To ensure that your news articles are properly indexed:

Make sure that each article is newsworthy and adheres to Google News content policies. Keep the sitemap under 50,000 URLs or 50 MB in size to comply with Google’s limits. Test your sitemap using online XML sitemap validators to ensure it is correctly formatted.

By following these steps, you can create and maintain an effective Google News sitemap that helps your news articles get indexed and discovered by readers.