News sitemap entries miss required tags

SeverityMedium

ScopeWhole site

EffortMedium

Verified byRe-crawl after you mark the task done

Rule keynews_sitemap_missing_tags

Short answer

Some <news:news> entries in your News sitemap are incomplete. Each entry needs <news:publication> with <news:name> and <news:language>, plus <news:publication_date> and <news:title>. Entries without them are ignored for news, so those articles lose the fast-discovery benefit. Fill in the missing tags in the generator that builds the sitemap.

Why it matters

A News sitemap that Google cannot use is worse than none: you believe new articles are being announced, but the incomplete ones are skipped. The usual causes are a plugin missing a setting (publication name or language) or articles without a stored publication date.

How Glimana detects it

Glimana parses every sitemap that contains news entries and records which required tags each <news:news> block lacks. The rule fires for each sitemap with at least one incomplete entry. The evidence names the sitemap, how many entries are affected, which tags are missing and example URLs.

How to fix it

Find the affected pages in Glimana. Open Issues › News sitemap entries miss required tags. This is a site-level check, so the single row carries the full evidence: the URLs, values or days involved. The task under Tasks shows the same list and the expected gain.

Apply the fix on your platform.

Each entry must have all four parts:

Tag	What to put in it
`<news:name>` (inside `<news:publication>`)	Your publication name, exactly as it appears on your articles
`<news:language>` (inside `<news:publication>`)	The article language as an ISO 639 code: `en`, `tr`, `de`; `zh-cn` / `zh-tw` for Chinese
`<news:publication_date>`	When the article was first published, in W3C format (`2026-10-27` or `2026-10-27T08:30:00+03:00`)
`<news:title>`	The article title, as shown on the page

The publication name and language are usually one setting in the generator; fix it once and every entry gains the tags.

WordPressShopifyCustom code

Open the news sitemap settings of your SEO plugin and fill in the publication name and language (Yoast News SEO: SEO → News SEO; Rank Math PRO: Sitemap Settings → News Sitemap). Missing dates or titles usually mean posts of a custom type that the plugin cannot read; check those posts have a published date and title.

Fix the template of the news sitemap app or custom route you use: publication name and language come from the shop settings, the date from article.published_at and the title from article.title.

Make the four tags non-optional in the generator: fail the build if the publication name or language is empty, and skip (rather than print half) any article without a publication date or title. Escape titles for XML.

Publish and clear caches. Save and publish, then make sure the crawler will see the new version: WordPress — clear the page cache in your cache plugin and purge the CDN; Shopify — theme and content changes go live on save, but purge any CDN in front of the store; custom code — deploy and purge the edge cache. Check in a private window or with curl -s https://your-domain/page | grep -i '<title\|canonical\|robots' that the live HTML has changed; Glimana reads what the server sends, not what your browser has cached.
Verify in Glimana. Open the task under Tasks and click Mark as done. The affected pages are queued for a verification crawl within a few hours, and the task closes when every news entry in your sitemaps has the required tags. If the check still fails, the task returns to New with a note; when it passes, the task is listed under Resolved technical issues on Impact reports. To check sooner, use Re-crawl affected pages on the issue.

How the fix is verified

The next crawl re-parses the News sitemaps; the task closes when no entry is missing a required tag.

Sources

Google Search Central — Create a News sitemap