Sitemap Ping Services

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & Ask.com now support Sitemaps AutoDiscovery. So how do you ping these services to notify the search engines of an update to your Sitemaps, if you do not want to wait for the SEs to find it themselves?

Sitemap Ping Service Links

Simple, you can submit your sitemap.xml file to the SEs manually. We recommended that you do it no more than once a day or after the completion of a major site update.

Ask Submission

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=[your sitemap web address] Examples

• http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.catanich.com/sitemap.xml.gz

Google Submission

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=[your sitemap web address] Examples

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.catanich.com/sitemap.xml.gz

BING -- MSN/Live New Submission

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your sitemap web address] Examples

• http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.catanich.com/sitemap.xml.gz

Yahoo Submission

Yahoo no longer supports this feature. They now use BING services.

Notes

• If you don't have a sitemap, use the sitemap creator to create one.
• Google requires you to submit your sitemap to them first - then you can ping them through this service. Yahoo/Bing, & Ask.com allow the ping to act as a submission as well.
• This is not the same as a 'blog ping' - although your blog can have a sitemap file.
• It is not recommended to submit/ping more than once per day
• Sitemap submission/pings are not meant to and will most likely not boost your PageRank with any of the search engines - sitemaps are only meant to allow crawlers to get to your content more effectively.

Did you know?

Many of the SEs participant in the "Sitemaps via robots.txt protocol". See Sitemap submission By Robots.txt file. We look forward to our collaboration with Google, Microsoft and others in furthering important initiatives that make search easier for webmasters and more powerful for users.