Validating a News Sitemap

The following XML schemas define the elements and attributes that can appear in a News Sitemap file. A News Sitemap can contain both News-specific elements and core Sitemap elements. You can download the schemas from the links below:

• For News-specific elements: http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9/sitemap-news.xsd
• For core Sitemap elements: http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd

There are a number of tools available to help you validate the structure of your Sitemap based on these schemas. You can find a list of XML-related tools at each of the following locations:

• http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema#Tools
• http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/13/schematools.html

In order to validate your News Sitemap file against a schema, the XML file will need additional headers as shown below:

<?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:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
     xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
       http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd
       http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9
       http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9/sitemap-news.xsd">
 <url>
    ...
 </url>
</urlset>