Index images, videos and news with specialized sitemaps

If you take the time to create content online, you probably want people to read it. It doesn't have to go viral, but it'd be nice if some folks read it, right?

But for people to read your stuff, they must know about it. And for this, Google (or other search engines) must index your site. Googlebot is usually pretty good at following all the trails to discover your pages, but you can also lay some breadcrumbs by providing a good old sitemap.xml.

A sitemap is a document that lists all the pages that should be indexed by a search engine. Here's an example.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2022-06-04</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

It's a list of your site's pages, their importance, hints on how often you update them, and the time of their last update.

There's a ton of "SEO Foo" around the topic; I usually create a basic sitemap, submit it via the Google Search Console, and call it a day.

I trust Googlebot to find and consider my best content by itself anyway.

But today I learned that Google also accepts more specialized sitemaps for images, videos, and news.

They all come with a Google-defined schema defined at google.com/schema/. Fancy!

As a reference — here's a Google image sitemap.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
    xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/sample1.html</loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://example.com/photo.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/sample2.html</loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://example.com/picture.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>

Here we have a Google video sitemap.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
    xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
    <video:video>
      <video:thumbnail_loc>https://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
      <video:title>Lizzi is painting the wall</video:title>
      <video:description>
        Gary is watching the paint dry on the wall Lizzi painted.
      </video:description>
      <video:player_loc>
        https://player.vimeo.com/video/987654321
      </video:player_loc>
    </video:video>
  </url>
</urlset>

And here's a Google news sitemap.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
    xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
  <url>
  <loc>http://www.example.org/business/article55.html</loc>
  <news:news>
    <news:publication>
      <news:name>The Example Times</news:name>
      <news:language>en</news:language>
    </news:publication>
    <news:publication_date>2008-12-23</news:publication_date>
    <news:title>Companies A, B in Merger Talks</news:title>
  </news:news>
  </url>
</urlset>

Will I now drop everything and add these to all my sites? Naaaah, I think I'm fine.

But it's still good to know these special sitemaps exist. If human-created free content will survive all the AI nonsense we see today, it might be helpful to point search engines to my future images, videos and news explicitely.