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Sitemap Glossary

What is News Sitemap?

A specialized sitemap for news websites that helps Google News discover and index articles.

A news sitemap is a specialized XML sitemap designed for Google News publishers. It includes articles published within the last 48 hours and uses the `news` namespace extension to provide metadata like publication name, language, and publication date.

News sitemaps should only include URLs of articles, not section pages or other non-article content. Google recommends updating news sitemaps as soon as new articles are published.

To use news sitemaps effectively, a site must be included in Google News. The sitemap helps ensure new articles are discovered and indexed quickly, which is critical for time-sensitive news content.

Example

<?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>https://example.com/news/breaking-story</loc>
    <news:news>
      <news:publication>
        <news:name>Example Times</news:name>
        <news:language>en</news:language>
      </news:publication>
      <news:publication_date>2025-03-15T14:30:00+00:00</news:publication_date>
      <news:title>Breaking: Major Event Occurs</news:title>
    </news:news>
  </url>
</urlset>

Work with sitemaps programmatically

SitemapKit's API lets you discover, extract, and parse XML sitemaps from any domain. Get structured JSON data with all sitemap elements including News Sitemap.

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