Google News Sitemaps for News Publishers

In an effort to assist news publishers with control over which articles are included in Google News and how, Google has now added Sitemaps for Google News to its arrary of Webmaster Tools. From Nathan Stoll, Product Manager, Google News on the Google Blog:

… we’re adding Google News support within Google webmaster tools.

Now, English-language publishers who are currently included in Google News will be able to use their existing feeds — or define a more advanced Sitemap of their current news articles — to tell us exactly which articles they’d like us to crawl. While they’ve always been able to use technical solutions such as robots.txt to govern which portions of their sites Google crawls and indexes, this will give publishers more granular tools to tell our crawlers exactly what should be included.

We also want to provide content owners more visibility into which articles are ultimately included in Google News, so we’re now offering error reports specific to Google News. These error reports will explain any problems we experienced crawling or extracting news articles from a publisher’s site. Although we try to make our crawl and analysis as comprehensive as possible, there are always a small number of sites and articles that we’re not able to correctly analyze and include. We hope these new tools will help publishers resolve such issues.