A couple of days ago I wrote about a great new feature being offered by Google, Microsoft, Ask, and Yahoo that allows you to specify a sitemap via your robots.txt file. According to a lot of people you should still initially ping the SEs with your sitemap, mostly to test for errors. Here is how that can be done:
To ping Google simply enter the follow URL into your browser:
http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=SITEMAPURL
Remember to switch SITEMAPURL with your sitemap’s full URL (with http://)
You should really submit it via the Google Webmaster Tools to take advantage of some awesome tools.
Ask.com
Ask.com also offers a similar solution:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=SITEMAPURL
Yahoo
To ping Yahoo I am 99% sure you need a Yahoo account so you can use Site Explorer. To ping them goto the following URL:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit/
Once there scroll to the bottom and enter your sitemap URL under the “submit site feed” section. It will ask you for your username and such if you are not logged in.
MSN
I haven’t a clue, Microsoft is pretty horrible at making their stuff easy to use. I spent about an hour trying to find a usable ping URL but couldn’t find anything.
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