If your website is included in Google's News crawl, you now have the ability to more directly control how your content is included and indexed.  Expanding the range of the existing Sitemaps protocol, Google announced today that sitemaps could now be utilized for those sites included in Google News.

For the time being, the new sitemaps features are only available to English-language news sites.  To access the sitemap submission and management area, website owners should add their news sites to Webmaster Central's Webmaster Tools.  As illustrated on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, a new report will show up in the "Crawl Errors" section of the site.  If the news crawler has any problems reading and extracting your news articles, the problems will appear there.

Google News sitemaps extends the same control and customization as the existing sitemap tools to news sites.  To recap, your news site must be English-language and it must be listed in your Google Webmaster Tools.  Not to worry, though.  You can add your news site to Webmaster Tools at any time to use the new sitemaps and error reports.  And additional languages are slated for future releases.

Do you have a news site that isn't included in Google News?  Stay tuned to find out how to get added.