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:
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:
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:
Let's give it a try. This morning, a colleague saw Google help articles about News sitemaps had disappeared.E.g., on https://t.co/CHmC1qeiH0 the links to validating sitemaps and to potential errors are no longer pointing to existing pages. Does anyone know what's happening? #SEO— Taco Verdo (@TacoVerdo) July 28, 2023
Update: Lizzi Sassman from Google explained:
Google dropped some of the old Google News sitemap documentation but it was a while ago, but links exist to them https://t.co/RBFU7qU02e via @TacoVerdo and @alexmoss - fyi @okaylizzi pic.twitter.com/8ReZ97BViu
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) July 31, 2023
Update 2: The redirects are in place:
redirects are working now
— Lizzi Sassman (@okaylizzi) July 31, 2023
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