Sitemaps For Google News

Google has introduced sitemaps for Google News. So if you have a site included in Google News, you can creat and submit News Sitemaps to inform Google about the articles that you wish to be included in Google News.

In addition, you can access crawl errors, which tell you if there were any problems crawling the articles in your News Sitemaps, or, for that matter, any articles on your site that Google News reaches through its normal crawl.

The freshness of the content is more of an urgent concern here than in case websites. That is why News Sitemaps XML definition enables you to specify publication date and time of each article as well as keywords for appropriate posting.

However, the feature is available only for English news sites as per now. The new features are automatically updated in webmaster tools section. View a screenshot of the summary page here.

The Google blog specifies a few things to note:

• You will only have the news features enabled if your site is currently included in Google News. If it's not, you can request inclusion.
• In most cases, you should add the site for the hostname under which you publish your articles. For example, if you publish your articles at URLs such as http://www.example.com/business/article123.html, you should add the site http://www.example.com/.
• You must verify your site to enable the news features.

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