On August 6, 2022, Google will withdraw support from some image and video sitemap extensions. The decision was made after assessing the value of the sitemap extension tags. As you may know, sitemap extensions are crucial in helping search engines identify and understand the content of your website images and videos.
While Google offered no specific explanation why some tags were removed, they hope to “reduce the complexity of our codebases, and sitemaps will be less cluttered in general.”
If you’re actively indexing your website via sitemaps, this is for you. The reason seems to be noble, but how will this affect your site performance?
Deprecated Sitemap Image and Video Tags and Attributes
Here are the different image and video sitemaps to be removed:
Will This Affect Your Site Performance?
The specified tags will be discontinued on August 6, 2022. It will give plugin developers and theme makers enough time to remove them.
Good news: you don’t need to worry about keeping them on. Google assures publishers that there are no drawbacks if you choose to leave these on your sitemaps. The deprecated tags and attributes will only lose their function and will essentially be useless on indexing and search features.
As stated in Google’s announcement, you may receive notifications through Google Search Console if these updates are included in the next schema versions of the image and video extensions.
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What Should You Do?
If you’re submitting sitemaps as part of your SEO, this doesn’t have to bother you. The update won’t affect your site’s performance on Google Search. You don’t need to painstakingly remove the deprecated tags from your webpage and content sitemaps. Instead, you might want to skip using them from now on as they’ll be obsolete soon.
While you’re at it, explore simpler ways that are equally efficient in ranking you high on search engines. There are SEO tools and managed solutions that can help you perform SEO actions that best suit your business and aid your growth online.
