Pinging Search Engines when Sitemaps Change

July 18, 2007 by Pete Freitag

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.