I was all excited about the sitemaps standard when I first heard about it. The catch is, it's not clear when everyone will support it. This URL indicates that the following URL-template:
<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
is used to ping the various search engines to let them know that a sitemap is present, or updated in the sitemaps standard. I've attempted the following requests (Google's works -- http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=www.domain.com/sitemap.xml):
According to the spec, something like these should work for the other SEs:
yahoo.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
siteexplorer.yahoo.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url (guess?)
search.msn.com/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
None of them work. I can't find a specification for what the URLs will be. So when will it be implemented? I sit here with my chapter on sitemaps and wonder what I should cover. My coauthor and I have decided to leave the chapter as-is, but note that this standard is upcoming, and looking, for the most part, like the Google standard.
Update: John Mu pointed out that the Yahoo sitemap ping address looks like this: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml. I stand corrected -- thanks John, but so much for "standards" :) MSN does not have the functionality implemented at all, apparently.
Jeez, you'd think with all their cool .NET libraries (and their stated emphasis on search) they could deploy something like this quickly.
December 14th, 2006 at 10:30 am
You need to ping with different addresses:
Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit/ping?sitemap=www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
MSN/Live: Check back soon, perhaps when Vista SP2 is out the door
-- MSN/Live does not support sitemaps yet, we only have their promise that they'll work on it...
For what it's worth: Pinging Google with a changed sitemap file, especially with changed "last-modified" tags, will get those changed URLs crawled within hours (in my tests at least). It is the fastest way to get modified content into the index (assuming it already had enough value to merit being indexed). If you have a site with 1000's of URLs and 5 of them change, using a sitemap will save you the time it would have taken for Google to recrawl the whole site and find the changes. Yahoo is a bit lazy about it but I suppose they'll get there as well.
December 14th, 2006 at 10:33 am
oops, sorry, wrong cut+paste...
Yahoo's notification is at:
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
(or use your own appid, if you have one)
See http://developer.yahoo.com/search/siteexplorer/V1/updateNotification.html
Yes, it's weird.
April 21st, 2007 at 3:38 am
The currently correct ping-URL for Yahoo is:
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.domain.com%2Fsitemap.xml
From: http://developer.yahoo.com/search/siteexplorer/V1/ping.html
It's a bit more logical. I have no idea when they changed (the old one still works)