Google To Deprecate Some Sitemap Extension Tags

Google announced on August 6, 2022 it will no longer support some of the video and image sitemap extension tags. Google said “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.”

This will happen after August 6, 2022 and Google said the “deprecated tags will have no effect on indexing and search features” after that date.

These specifically impact the caption, geo_location, title and license tags or attributes within image sitemaps and category, player_loc[@allow_embed], player_loc[@autoplay], gallery_loc, price[@all] and tvshow[@all] within video sitemaps.

Google may notify sites that are using these tags about this in Google Search Console in the future. Gary Illyes from Google wrote “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,” Gary Illyes added.

Google is doing this to simplify sitemap extensions, Google said it hopes “you can also reduce complexity of your codebases, and sitemaps will be less cluttered in general.”

Forum discussion at Twitter.