How to Ping Your Sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing
June 25th 2009 2:35 PM
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XML sitemaps inform search engines about the pages available to crawl on your website. Search engines find new pages by navigating links on websites. Sitemaps enhance search engine crawling by providing explicit information about the specific urls on your website. Sitemaps don’t ensure that your webpages will be indexed, but they typically increase both the chance and speed of indexing.
If you have fresh content on your blog or website, it is prudent to make sure the search engines know about this to get the content indexed as soon as possible. One way this is done is by pinging your xml sitemap. Although there are many search engines and services you can ping your sitemap to, make sure you concentrate on the big 3: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
So, how do you automatically ping your updated sitemap each time your website updates? Read How to Ping Your Sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing to find out:
If you’ve got an XML sitemap for your website, you can alert the search engines to updates by typing a specially formatted URL into your browser.
Ping Bing
Bing is Microsoft’s newly branded and revamped search engine that is gaining popularity and market share every day since its recent launch. It’s well known that Bing takes a long time to initially index a website, so ping their service when you launch a website and every time you update content.
Their ping service is http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your sitemap web address].
In my case this would be: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.bluefalconmarketing.com/sitemap.xml
You can manually ping Bing by entering the above url in a web browser and pressing enter. I prefer to automate this process, by entering the url into a ping list in WordPress. WordPress will then automatically ping Bing each time I update or submit a new post.
Ping Google
Google is the dominant search engine, and you will want to inform when something new or changes appears on your site.
The ping url is http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap-file.xml, in my case it would be http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.bluefalconmarketing.com/sitemap.xml
Again, you can manually visit this url to ping Google, or add the url to an automated pinging service if this is supported by your website development platform.
Ping Yahoo
Yahoo’s ping service lets you notify them anytime your site changes so their index can be updated quicker. Their ping url is http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml, in my case this would be http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.bluefalconmarketing/sitemap.xml
You can automatically submit your updated site map using a pinging service or manually entering the above url.
If you don’t have an xml sitemap yet, you can use a free xml sitemap generator to get you started.
What search engines do you ping to? What blog search services do you ping to? Do you see xml sitemap pinging as useful to your website?
Grateful for the search engine ping information.
The Yahoo URL doesn’t seem to work for me. The exact same URL is listed on other sites as well, but it isn’t working today.
All the others were successful.
Thanks.
Thanks for the post, great help for some SEO work
nice info on pinging.very helpful.
tnks its work for me
I use the auto ping for my WP & also manual ping for my blog
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Thanks for sharing; i found that for doing it with google; the site map has to be first submitted by google webmaster tools and then you can ping for updates using this way.
thanks for info.I have now learnt how to ping to search engines
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Thanks for your post,but I have a question,How to get the response result after you send the ping ruquest to bing or yahoo or google ? just send the request at all?
How can i ping a site, with new content
Hi,
I am looking for a single url using which i can ping all site at once. I remember sometime back i used, but now not remember. Please let me know.
I’ve made a tool where you can ping your sitemap to google, yahoo and bing according to the urls from this post.
Here: http://backcenter.info/ping.php
It runs very good! Thanks for the tool!
Doesn’t google just flag you as spam if you submit the site vs. if you just link to it from somewhere?
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Submitting your blog to search engine confirms more traffic to your site.
Now even Bing has launched its new Bing webmaster tools.
Read-> How to submit your blogger to new bing webmaster tools
We have a tool that could generate a sitemap for you: http://www.vertuna.com/vertuna-tools/sitemap-generator
And the one that could automatically ping major search engines - http://www.vertuna.com/vertuna-tools/sitemap-ping
Ca someone say if pinging the sitemap is effective if you have submitted the site map to the search engine already
Thanks
For Blogs manually ping google use: http://blogsearch.google.com/ping
To ping yahoo you need to register for an App ID: http://developer.yahoo.com/search/siteexplorer/V1/ping.html
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