Online Journalism News

Google News sitemaps go global

Google has given publishers greater control over how their articles appear on its news site by extending its news sitemaps service.

The news sitemaps, which tell Google which news articles from a publisher should be 'crawled', are being made available globally, in all the languages supported by Google, allowing publishers to have greater control over how their content appears through the news portal.

The expansion of this function, which was previously available to English language news sites only, is the latest in a series of new services introduced by Google's news team, following the trial of comments from people participating in news stories and a deal to publish agency news stories.

Part of the sitemaps service enables publishers to specify keywords for each article allowing Google to better place articles in the appropriate news section.

Error reports explaining any problems experienced in crawling or extracting articles and information on the types of queries that lead Google News users to publishers' websites will also be available through the feature.

To take advantage of this latest development, news providers' sites must be included in Google News or registered through Google's Webmaster Tools.

Publishers who do not use the news sitemaps will still have their sites crawled, a post on the Google News blog said.

The same post advised news providers to submit articles to be crawled as early as possible.

"The earlier you submit, the sooner we can crawl and extract them," wrote Benoit Lafortune from the Google News support team.

"The result is that you'll boost your publishing power, and we'll process your most recent articles more quickly, since we recrawl all news sitemaps frequently."

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