Google News sitemaps

A Google News sitemap lists your newest articles so Google News can find them fast. If it stops updating, new stories can stop reaching Google News without anything looking broken on the site. SEOComet reads news sitemaps more often than other sitemaps (not on Free) and checks them with rules of their own.

How SEOComet spots a news sitemap

You don’t set anything. Any sitemap check can turn out to be a news sitemap: when a sitemap lists pages and at least one of them has Google News tags (news:news), SEOComet treats it as a news sitemap from that check on. It shows as News sitemap in your lists of checks, and moves onto the news sitemap schedule straight away.

If a later check finds no news tags, it goes back to being a regular sitemap, with the regular schedule and rules. A sitemap index that lists a news sitemap gets these rules for it, unless that news sitemap has a check of its own. Then only its own check reports on it, so one problem never opens two incidents.

A news sitemap that goes missing or can’t be read raises the same issues as any other sitemap. See Sitemap checks.

How often

Every hour on Free, every 15 minutes on Pro and every 10 minutes on Business. See How often checks run.

Freshness

A news sitemap should always have a recent article in it. If the newest publication date in the file is older than your limit, that’s critical: new stories are probably not getting into the sitemap. The limit is 6 hours by default, anywhere from 1 to 72.

A quiet newsroom that publishes less often can raise it in the check’s Settings as Critical when no new article for (hours). That’s the only setting a news sitemap has. The URL drop and stale lastmod rules for regular sitemaps don’t apply, because a news sitemap’s count and dates move all the time.

Publication dates more than an hour in the future are ignored. They’re usually scheduled posts or a wrong time zone, and say nothing about whether the sitemap is up to date.

Old articles

Google says a news sitemap should only list articles from the last two days, and that older ones should be removed or lose their news:news tags (Google’s news sitemap guide). SEOComet raises a warning for articles older than 48 hours, with how many there are and the date of the oldest. They can stay in your regular sitemap.

A news sitemap can also hold at most 1,000 URLs. Past that, Google may not read the rest, and you get a warning.

Every URL needs the four news tags: the publication’s name and language, the article’s title and a valid publication date. A URL missing any of them, including a plain URL with no news tags at all, is counted, and the issue shows a few examples.

The spot-check

On every check, SEOComet also opens the 5 newest articles in the sitemap, one after another, and checks that Google News could index each:

• It answers with a success status, after any redirects.
• It isn’t set to noindex, in a robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag header.
• Its canonical link, if it has one, points to the article itself.

An article has to fail on two checks in a row before it raises New article not indexable, with the reason. Many publishers set a brand-new article to noindex for its first few minutes while it’s being edited, so one failed check on its own isn’t reported.

An article that doesn’t answer or answers with a server error is tried again once a few seconds later before it counts as failed. One that answers 401, 403 or 429 is shown as blocked for SEOComet, not as broken: that’s a firewall or bot protection turning SEOCometBot away, which says nothing about Google. See Let SEOCometBot through.

Articles on another domain aren’t opened. If the check runs short of time, the rest are skipped for that run.

What it can find

Each of these is checked on every run and stays raised until the cause is gone. New article not indexable only looks at the 5 newest articles, so it also clears once newer articles replace the broken one.