News (publishers)

Sometimes, good news stories come with even better images. In our goal to show users the most relevant and useful news content, we want to display your site's great images in addition to your articles.

You can increase the likelihood that your images will be returned in search results when you follow our best practices for publishing images. In addition, you can also use Google's image extension for Sitemaps to give Google News additional information about the images on your article pages. When you use Google's image extension, you help Google News identify the most important and relevant images on an article page.

Adding images to your News Sitemap

1. Define the XML namespace for Images.

In the <urlset> tag at the top, specify the XML namespace for Images in addition to the News namespace in your Sitemap:

News	xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9".
Images	xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"

Google recommends that you create separate Sitemaps for your news content, combining both your news articles along with the images associated with your news articles; these Sitemaps will be crawled very frequently to check for new articles. More information about News Sitemaps.

2. Optionally add one or more <image> blocks inside each <url> tag.

For each URL you list in your Sitemap, optionally add information about important images on that page. Below is an example of a hybrid sitemap containing one news article along with an associated image:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
       xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9" 
       xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">

<url>     
  <loc>http://www.example.com/article123.html</loc>     
  <news:news>       
    <news:publication>         
     <news:name>The Example Times</news:name>         
     <news:language>en</news:language>       
    </news:publication>       
    <news:publication_date>2008-02-03</news:publication_date>       
    <news:genres>pressrelease, blog</news:genres>       
    <news:access>registration</news:access>       
    <news:keywords>business, finance</news:keywords>       
    <news:title>Example Title</news:title>     
  </news:news>     
  <image:image>       
   <image:loc>http://www.example.com/image1.jpg</image:loc>     
  </image:image>   
 </url> 
</urlset> 

Please note that the inclusion of your images in Google News also depends on the following:

• The <image:loc> tag in your sitemap must specify the URL of an image on your article page.
• Generally, we recommend specifying at most one image per article. If multiple valid images are specified, our crawler will have to pick one arbitrarily.
• Images in News Sitemaps should be in jpeg or png format, with an extension of .jpg, .jpeg, or .png

Image tag definitions

Tag	Required	Description
<image:image>	Yes	Encloses all information about a single image. Each URL (<loc> tag) can include up to 1,000 <image:image> tags.
<image:loc>	Yes	The URL of the image.
<image:caption>	Optional	The caption of the image.
<image:geo_location>	Optional	The geographic location of the image. For example, <image:geo_location>Limerick, Ireland</image:geo_location>.
<image:title>	Optional	The title of the image.
<image:license>	Optional	A URL to the license of the image.