Pete Freitag Pete Freitag

Pinging Search Engines when Sitemaps Change

Published on July 18, 2007
By Pete Freitag
web

Here's another little known feature about the sitemaps protocol, you can actually ping search engines and crawlers to tell them about your sitemap, or to tell them that it has changed.

It's pretty simple all you need to do is send a HTTP request to:

http://search-engine-ping-url-goes-here/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

A few notes:

  • The search engine ping url for google is http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping
  • Your sitemap url should be URL encoded, that means use the URLEncodedFormat function if your using ColdFusion.
  • If the ping is valid, it will return a HTTP 200 OK response code.


google sitemaps seo webmasters ping

Pinging Search Engines when Sitemaps Change was first published on July 18, 2007.

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Comments

I like this article, clear and helpfull :)
by inderawan adi cahyono on 06/21/2010 at 3:19:02 AM UTC
Which sitemap format I will send to serach engines, sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz?
by Fun on 09/28/2010 at 9:58:01 AM UTC