
RebelMouse supports Google News sitemaps, and Google has specifications for how articles get treated in a Google News sitemap.
A sitemap is a file where you list the webpages of your site that tells Google and other search engines about the organization of your site's content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file so your site gets crawled intelligently.
Google News sitemaps help identify important information about every article, including genres, access tags, title, publication, and date. This allows Google to quickly determine what is a news article on your site, and then directly publish that URL to Google News. According to Google, it's a best practice for sitemaps for Google News to only show a site's posts from the previous 48 hours. This rule has had a positive effect on Google News traffic for many of the sites powered by RebelMouse.
Your sitemap can also provide valuable metadata associated with the pages you list in the sitemap. Metadata is information about a web page, such as when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and the importance of the page relative to other URLs on your site.
Depending on your content, it may be worth it to submit a sitemap specifically to Google News. Here's why, according to Google:
- Discover News Articles Faster: Sitemaps allow Google News to find all the news articles on your site more quickly.
- Crawl and Index All News Articles: Sitemaps point our crawler directly to each news article's URL, which improves coverage of the content on your site.
Related Articles