Friday, May 06, 2022
Over the years, we introduced a number of tags and tag attributes for Google sitemap extensions, specifically the Image and Video extensions. Most of these tags were added to allow site owners to deliver data more easily to Search.
Upon evaluating the value of the Google sitemap extension tags, we decided to officially deprecate some tags and attributes, and remove them from our documentation. The deprecated tags will have no effect on indexing and search features after August 6, 2022.
If you are a sitemap plugin developer or manage your own sitemaps, there's no immediate action required; you can leave these tags and attributes in place without drawbacks. In the future, Search Console may show warnings once these updates are included in the next schema versions of the Image and Video extensions.
The following tags and attributes are affected:
| Sitemap extension | Deprecated XML tag or attribute | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Image sitemap | caption |
Follow our images best practices. |
geo_location |
||
title |
||
license |
||
| Video sitemap | category |
Follow our video best practices. |
player_loc[@allow_embed] |
||
player_loc[@autoplay] |
||
gallery_loc |
||
price[@all] |
||
tvshow[@all] |
By simplifying sitemap extensions, we hope you can also reduce complexity of your codebases, and sitemaps will be less cluttered in general. If you have questions or comments, check out our sitemaps documentation, or catch us on Twitter or in the Search Central forums.