Wordpress XML Sitemap Plugin News sitemap

A Google News sitemap is a specialized XML file that web publishers can use to help search engines discover and index news articles on their websites more effectively. It is important that news sitemaps contain original recent content for them to perform well and meet with googles guidelines.

They are similar to regular XML Sitemaps, but contain additional information such as content headlines.

To enable news sitemaps you simply check the option in the main sitemap settings in the general section. there are two options:

• Include all posts/pages and we’ll filter the most recent ones in to a news sitemap
• Only include selected tags / categories

If you also select the images option, we’ll include images in your news sitemap as well.

When you select the tags/category option, you will need to select which tags / categories you want to include. To do this simply select include on the news option when adding / editing

When you add pages / posts to this category / tag they will now be included in your news feed automatically.

This will result in a news stemap along the lines of lines of :

<?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://xmlsitemapgenerator.org/en/</loc>
    <news:news>
      <news:publication>
        <news:name>Sitemap Times</news:name>
        <news:language>en</news:language>
      </news:publication>
      <news:publication_date>2008-12-23</news:publication_date>
      <news:title>Breaking news: XML Sitemaps are awesome</news:title>
    </news:news>
  </url>
</urlset>

Note - The plugin automatically filters pages/posts to only include those added in the last 48 hours.