Google Drops Google News Sitemap Validation & Errors Help Documents

Jul 31, 2023 - 7:11 am 0 by

Google Spider Web

Google has removed a couple of the Google News sitemaps help documentation. I should note, it seems these were removed a very long time ago, but the links to those documents still exist - but return a 404, page not found error.

This was spotted recently by Taco Verdo who posted about it on Twitter.

Here is the main live help document, you can see in the screenshot there are links to Validate a News sitemap and to News sitemap errors:

click for full size

Compare that to the same page from a couple years ago via the Wayback Machine and it is missing:

  • Create a Google News sitemap
  • Validate a News sitemap
  • News sitemap errors

Look at the links on the ride panel:

click for full size

Now, from the live page, two of those links are still hyperlinked in the main content but 404. Here are links to those pages so you can read them on the wayback machine:

So what happened to them? Probably just an oversight, right?

Here are the relevant tweets:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Lizzi Sassman from Google explained:

Update 2: The redirects are in place:

 

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