Sitemaps just make sense. You create a Sitemap file, or a set of files and a Sitemap Index, that has all the your site links crafted purely for search engine consumption. It’s like candy for the search giants since they get spoon-fed your site structure by you. Not only can it tell them where your content is, but it can tell them how often it changes, when it was last changed, and what priority it is to your site. Pure confection!
But the problem, for me at least, was finding the urls to ping so that you are not waiting for the giants to get a sweet tooth and come looking for you. The page on informing giants talks about a magical searchengine_URL that can be replace by your supporting giant. The problem: the site never tells what searchengine_URLs exist for your giant companions.
After some searching I finally found the urls that I was looking for. Where did I find the mystical urls you ask? Well it wasn’t from a google search (returned a lot of non-helpful links), it was from a wordpress plugin. In my opinion it is not a very good way to promote a service that is supposed to make it easier for you to get your content into the giants’ mouths.
Without further ado here are the urls that should work for sending your updated Sitemap to the search giants:
- http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=<url>
- http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=<url>
- http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=<url>
- http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=<Yahoo! Developer Key>&url=<url>
I would also suggest reading the other options for informing the search engines, such as adding ‘Sitemap: <url>’ to your robots.txt file and actually visiting to the giants’ playground.