Google News has released a sitemaps feature allowing news publishers to tell Google specifically which files should and should not be indexed. As posted by Google News Product Manager Nathan Stoll to the Official Google Blog,

“… publishers tell me consistently is that they want greater control and visibility into the process by which their content gets included in Google News. It’s been a longtime goal of ours to offer flexibility to publishers as we help them grow their online publications, so I’m pleased to tell you that we’re adding Google News support within Google webmaster tools.”

The development of a sitemaps feature for online news publishers allows for greater control over how Google’s bots access a news site and what content gets indexed. Several European publishers have criticized and even sued Google for republishing content they consider copyrighted. In his post, Stoll makes reference to their concerns saying,

“Now, English-language publishers who are currently included in Google News will be able to use their existing feeds — or define a more advanced Sitemap of their current news articles — to tell us exactly which articles they’d like us to crawl. While they’ve always been able to use technical solutions such as robots.txt to govern which portions of their sites Google crawls and indexes, this will give publishers more granular tools to tell our crawlers exactly what should be included.”

The introduction of a sitemap feature for publishers also helps Google keep track of the immense amount data it spiders on a daily basis by offering publishers the ability to specify publication date and time settings for unique articles. It also gives publishes the ability to note specific keywords in the article for improved placement against those words offering detailed search query stats showing which keywords attracted the best results.