The SEO environment is always shifting and evolving. Google and other search engines adjust their standards, algorithms, and expectations on a regular basis. We’re glad to claim that we assist our users in keeping up with such developments. Our staff regularly checks documents, news sources, and social media, and we respond swiftly when significant changes occur.
Google announced some changes to how they read and support XML sitemaps earlier today. And we’ve already distributed an update to our plugins a few hours later. Our consumers may stay on the leading edge by simply updating to the most recent version.
XML sitemap improvements
However, not all of Google’s adjustments are significant. Today’s update was, in reality, rather brief. However, success in SEO services is generally the result of numerous tiny adjustments, modifications, and upgrades. When competing with other websites, every tiny advantage counts.
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Changes to XML sitemap standards
Today’s updates concentrated on XML sitemaps, which are a key element of our plugins. Google has discontinued support for some types of picture and video information that we (used to) provide in our sitemaps. For example, they no longer read image captions, titles, or license information. These deprecated properties have been securely deleted.
Streamlining sitemaps provides several additional benefits, such as making the files smaller, quicker, and easier to create. On a larger scale, this is both good for energy consumption and good for the environment. At Yoast, we’re all about building a more sustainable world (world wide web) for everyone.
Spring Cleaning: Some sitemap extension tags are now being removed
We’ve introduced a number of tags and tag attributes for Google sitemap extensions, specifically the Image and Video extensions, over the years. The majority of these tags were added to make it easier for site owners to deliver data to Search.
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We decided to officially deprecate some tags and attributes and remove them from our documentation after evaluating the value of the Google sitemap extension tags.
After August 6, 2022, the deprecated tags will have no effect on indexing or search features.
| Sitemap extension | Deprecated XML tag or attribute | Recommendation |
| Image sitemap | caption | Follow our images’ best practices. |
| geo_location | ||
| title | ||
| license | Continue using IPTC metadata for providing licensing data. | |
| Video sitemap | category | Follow our video best practices. |
| player_loc[@allow_embed] | ||
| player_loc[@autoplay] | ||
| gallery_loc | ||
| price[@all] | ||
| tvshow[@all] | ||
Sitemap plugin developer action required
There is no immediate action required if you are installed some sitemap or SEO Plugins like (Yoast , and RankMath) developer or manage your own sitemaps; you can leave these tags and attributes in place without consequences. Once these updates are included in the next schema versions of the Image and Video extensions, the Search Console may display warnings in the future.
Hoping that we can reduce clutter in sitemaps and code complexity in sitemap generators, we're deprecating a handful of XML tags and attributes in Video and Image sitemaps. Read more: https://t.co/ziSBsQmuEo
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) May 6, 2022
We hope that by simplifying sitemap extensions, you will be able to reduce the complexity of your codebases and make sitemaps documents less cluttered in general.
