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:

Hmm weird. I do see them on archive here https://t.co/UMTJUmovD0 and here https://t.co/7xw12avS7v but odd they 404 now. If not @JohnMu then maybe @dannysullivan? cc @rustybrick

— Alex Moss (@alexmoss) July 28, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Lizzi Sassman from Google explained:

we’re just deduping content and waiting on them to redirect. for ex, the news sitemap errors page should redirect to this subsection: https://t.co/yFsPBHhI9A pic.twitter.com/O9kR5WPiD5

— Lizzi Sassman (@okaylizzi) July 31, 2023

Update 2: The redirects are in place:

redirects are working now

— Lizzi Sassman (@okaylizzi) July 31, 2023