News and video sitemaps

RankKit SEO Pro This feature is part of RankKit SEO Pro. Start a 14-day free trial or see plans.

RankKit SEO Pro adds two specialised sitemaps next to your XML sitemaps. The Google News sitemap lists the articles you published in the last 48 hours, in the format Google News expects. The video sitemap lists the videos embedded in your posts, so Google can find them for video results.

Both are off by default. Both are added to the sitemap index at /wp-sitemap.xml and to your robots.txt when you turn them on.

Google News sitemap

The news sitemap is only for sites accepted as Google News publishers. If you aren't one, leave it off: a regular sitemap covers your articles.

1. Go to RankKit SEO → Settings → Sitemaps.
2. In the Google News sitemap card, turn on Enable the news sitemap.
3. Fill in the settings below and click Save changes.

Setting	Default	What it does
Publication name	Your site name	Must match your publication name exactly as it appears on news.google.com.
Language	Site language	ISO 639 code such as en, de or zh-cn. Leave empty to use the site language.
Content types	Posts	Which content types count as news articles.

The sitemap is at /wp-sitemap-news-1.xml. It lists up to 1,000 articles published in the last 48 hours, with their publication date and title. Noindexed and password-protected posts are left out. It is cached for 5 minutes, so new articles appear quickly.

Video sitemap

1. Go to RankKit SEO → Settings → Sitemaps.
2. In the Video sitemap card, turn on Enable the video sitemap.
3. Choose the Content types to scan (default: Posts and Pages) and click Save changes.

The sitemap is at /wp-sitemap-video-1.xml. RankKit SEO finds:

• YouTube and Vimeo embeds (embed blocks, iframes and pasted URLs)
• Video blocks
• [video] shortcodes and <video> tags

Each entry has the video's thumbnail, title and description. YouTube thumbnails come from YouTube's image server. For other videos, RankKit SEO uses the video's poster image, then the post's featured image.

Note Videos without a thumbnail (for example Vimeo without a featured image) are left out, as Google requires one. Set a featured image on posts with Vimeo or self-hosted videos.

The video sitemap is cached for 12 hours.

Multilingual sites

With Polylang or WPML, each language gets its own news and video sitemap (for example /fr/wp-sitemap-news-1.xml), listing only the posts in that language. See Multilingual SEO.

Check it works

1. Open View sitemap on the Sitemaps settings tab. The index should list the news and video sitemaps.
2. Open your robots.txt (/robots.txt). It should contain a Sitemap: line for each.
3. Submit wp-sitemap-news-1.xml (news publishers) or wp-sitemap-video-1.xml in Google Search Console under Sitemaps.

FAQ

My news sitemap is empty. Is it broken?

Probably not. It lists only posts from the last 48 hours in the chosen content types. If you haven't published in two days, it has nothing to list.

Do I also need VideoObject schema?

The sitemap helps Google find videos. VideoObject schema describes each one on the page. Add a Video item in the Schema manager: its fields are pre-filled from the first video in the post.

What happens if my Pro license ends?

The news and video sitemaps are no longer served or listed. Your regular XML sitemaps keep working.