Google News has introduced some changes in the sitemap protocol that news sites use to submit sitemaps to it.

Google has introduced three tags - publication - to specify the name and language of the publication publishing the article; genres - to describe the "nature of the article as a comma-separated list chosen from: PressRelease, Satire, Blog, OpEd, Opinion, and UserGenerated" and access - to specify any article access limitations: choices - Subscription or Registration.

These tags are required wherever applicable.

Google News has dispensed with the publication label pulldown menu in Webmaster Tools. The "equivalent’ information should now be attached to each individual article.

It gives breathing space of six months "to use the old format for any existing Sitemap that was originally submitted using the old format. " "For previously-submitted Sitemaps in the old format, we will "remember" the last publication label you selected from the pulldown menu and use that; however, please update to the new format as soon as you can."

Sitemaps can now be re-submitted two other ways - robots.txt or ping - apart from the Webmaster Tools account. In addition to re-submitting your Google News Sitemap through your Webmaster Tools account, you can now resubmit it two other ways: robots.txt or ping.

Sites that are heavily into optimising their content for Google will lose no time in implementing these changes, I guess. Google says sitemaps have to do more with control than rankings: "Please note that Google News doesn’t favor sites that use News Sitemaps in ranking results. Whether or not there’s a News Sitemap available, Google News will use normal crawl methods to search and index all news sites (homepage and sections)," it explains elsewhere.

Google link: A new face to Google News Sitemaps

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