LLM Best Practices

Sitemap extensions: news, image, and video

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Overview

Use a separate child sitemap for each format extension (news, image, video) and list them all in the sitemap index. Each extension has its own namespace, required fields, and limits that differ from the regular URL sitemap. This page covers those format rules; the index, <lastmod>, gzip, and robots.txt rules that apply to every sitemap live in sitemaps-deep.

Ship separate sitemaps for pages, news, images, and video

Splitting by format makes the index visible to engines that consume one format and not another, keeps file sizes manageable, and lets each sitemap follow the rules its format requires.

  • pages.xml: every canonical content URL.
  • news.xml: news articles published in the last 48 hours (see below).
  • images.xml: image entries nested under their parent page URL.
  • videos.xml: video entries with thumbnail, duration, and player URL (see video-seo).
  • products.xml: e-commerce sites can split product URLs from editorial content.

The index file lists all of them. Google Search Console reports indexing status per child sitemap, which makes diagnosing format-specific drops faster.

News sitemap rules: last 48 hours, under 1000 URLs

The News sitemap format is separate from the regular sitemap and serves the Google News index.

  • Include only articles published in the last 48 hours. Older articles get removed; including them does nothing.
  • Limit to 1000 URLs per news sitemap. Above that, split into multiple files.
  • Required fields per entry: news:publication (name and language), news:publication_date (ISO 8601), news:title.
  • Regenerate every time a new article publishes; ping IndexNow on every regeneration.

See news-seo for the Publisher Center setup and NewsArticle schema rules.

Image sitemap: one entry per image, parent URL pinned

The Image sitemap format extends the regular sitemap with image entries nested under each URL.

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/products/trail-runner-3</loc>
  <image:image>
    <image:loc>https://example.com/img/tr3-black.jpg</image:loc>
  </image:image>
</url>
  • One <image:image> entry per image; up to 1000 images per URL.
  • The parent <loc> is the page that hosts the image, not the image URL itself.
  • Google supports only <image:loc>; it deprecated image:caption, image:title, image:license, and image:geo_location in 2022. Use IPTC metadata or license structured data for licensing.

See image-seo for the on-page image SEO rules.

Common errors

  • News sitemap full of week-old articles. The format requires the 48-hour window; older entries do nothing.

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