Google News and Image Sitemaps
The Extensions tab at Super Speedy > Sitemaps holds two optional sitemap extensions: a Google News sitemap for news publishers, and image entries for your post-based sitemaps. Both are off by default.
Google News sitemap
A Google News sitemap lists your most recent news articles with their publication name, language and publish date, so Google News can pick them up quickly. It is only useful if your site publishes news. Read Google’s news sitemap guidelines before enabling it.
Turn it on
Under Google News Sitemap, tick Enable extension. This adds post_google_news.xml to your sitemap index.
Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| News name | Your Site Title | The publication name Google News shows. It must match the name Google News knows you by |
| News language | English | The language of your articles |
| News age | 2 days | Articles older than this are left out. Google only accepts articles from the last two days, so leave it at 2. 0 disables the limit and is not recommended |
| News post type | Posts | The post type your news articles use |
| News taxonomy | Categories | The taxonomy that marks which articles are news |
| News terms and genres | – | Which terms to Include or Exclude, and an optional Google News genre for each |
| Enable multi-term support | Off | For articles assigned to more than one term |
| Enable keywords support | Off | Adds keywords to each entry from the Keyword source taxonomy |
The news sitemap holds at most 1,000 articles, which is Google’s limit.
Use Include and tick only your news categories. That way an article only enters the news sitemap when you put it in a news category, and evergreen content stays out.
Do not use a tag-like taxonomy such as Tags as the news taxonomy. Sites usually have far more tags than categories, and the news query gets much slower.
If non-news content turns up in Google News, see Frequently Asked Questions.
Enable pinging on this extension tries to ping Google whenever a news article is published. Google has retired its sitemap ping endpoint, so leave this off.
Image sitemaps
Under Google Image Sitemap, tick Enable extension and choose the post types under Enable for following post types. Each URL in those post types’ sitemaps then carries an <image:image> entry for its featured image, which helps Google Images find and attribute your images.
- Only post types that support featured images can be selected.
- Your theme must have featured images (post thumbnails) enabled.
- If the Google News sitemap uses the same post type, the featured image is added to news entries too.
Image entries need extra lookups per URL. On a large catalogue, check the build time in the sitemap’s last-line comment before and after enabling it, and switch it off first if sitemaps slow down. See Large Sites and Performance.
After changing either extension
If caching is on, click Save Changes and Flush Cache so the affected sitemaps rebuild.
Further reading
Written for Super Speedy Sitemaps 1.11.17.
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