Two more weeks to update your Google News Sitemap

Posted by Andy Golding, Google News Software Engineer

Almost five months ago, we announced a redesign for our Google News Sitemap. We wanted to give publishers plenty of advance notice so they could make a smooth transition to the new format.

This transition period will end on May 4, when we’ll discontinue supporting all old-style Google News Sitemaps. If you are a publisher and haven’t already shifted your Google News sitemap to the new format, we urge you to do so by following these instructions as soon as possible. This update is key to avoid interruption in crawling your content and allow our crawler to capture all necessary information about your articles.

If you’ve already made the changes to your sitemap, we thank you. There is no need to worry about this update. If you’re interested in learning more about Google News sitemaps, we encourage you to read this section of our Help Center and submit a sitemap for your articles in Google News. You may also be interested in checking out our Help Forum where other publishers have shared useful tips and discussed other Sitemaps-related questions.

Don’t forget to update your Google News Sitemaps. There are only two more weeks to go!