Google News uses a number of signals to provide users with relevant local news near them. To enable our system to better identify the geographic location of your articles, we suggest you use the <geo_locations> tag in a Google News Sitemap. For the values in the <geo-locations> tag you should be as specific as possible to better identify the exact location of your content. As long as you list values from smallest to largest, you can use any of the following formats (without the brackets):
- [City], [State/Province] [Country]
- [City], [Country]
- [State/Province], [Country]
For example, the <geo_locations> tag for an article from the city of Detroit, Michigan in the United States would look like the following in your sitemap:
<news:geo_locations>Detroit, Michigan, USA</news:geo_locations>
You can specify different values for individual articles on the same sitemap. We highly encourage that you use this tag if your organization has many offices or reporters in different locations reporting on varied locales.
For more information on how to implement the <geo_locations> tag in a Google News Sitemaps, you can review this article.