News SEO & sitemaps
Separate fresh-news discovery from archive discovery, and validate what your sitemap actually publishes.
1. Start with eligible news content
Choose the post types and editorial sections that genuinely contain news reporting. Do not label evergreen service pages, advertisements, or every historical article as fresh news. Publisher names, article titles, languages, publication times, and public URLs should reflect the story itself.
News sitemap inclusion is a discovery signal, not a guarantee of Google News inclusion or indexing. Accuracy, originality, accessible content, and editorial transparency remain important outside any SEO plugin.
2. Respect the fresh-news window
Google’s news sitemap guidance limits news entries to articles published within the previous two days and limits a news sitemap to 1,000 news entries. When the news window expires, remove the news entry or its news-specific metadata; the article can remain discoverable in an ordinary XML sitemap.
Use the original publication date for the news publication timestamp. Do not reset that timestamp simply to make an old article appear fresh. When a story is substantially updated, show a truthful update time on the article and distinguish it from the original publication time.
3. Separate discovery responsibilities
| Sitemap | Purpose | Validation focus |
|---|---|---|
| News | Recent eligible reporting | Publication time, title, language |
| General XML | Canonical public URLs | Status, indexing policy, accurate updates |
| Image / video | Supported media discovery | Accessible assets and truthful media details |
PublishRank describes cursor-based processing and prepared sitemap shards for larger archives. Review the installed release and your hosting behavior before choosing processing schedules. Do not infer an unlimited archive capacity from the architecture.
4. Check the served XML
- Open the sitemap index and each relevant child sitemap.
- Verify a successful response, valid XML, and the expected content type.
- Inspect a freshly published eligible story and confirm its canonical production URL.
- Check that expired news entries stop appearing in the fresh-news window.
- Ensure excluded, private, redirected, and intentionally non-indexable pages are not submitted as canonical content.
Submit the actual sitemap index URL in Search Console. Do not guess a plugin endpoint from this documentation: discover it through your installed release or the live site configuration.
5. Troubleshoot missing or stale stories
Check publication status, publication time and timezone, eligibility rules, canonical URL, robots directives, caches, and scheduled processing. Test the live response after clearing the appropriate cache. A crawler block and a noindex directive are different mechanisms; inspect both.
If the generated XML is correct but a story is not indexed, use Search Console to inspect discovery and indexing information. Avoid repeatedly changing dates or URLs to force indexing.
Reference: Google news sitemap guidance · Sitemap overview