How to ping search engines? What is the point of pinging search engines?

Thursday, 18 March 2010 03:49

What is the point of pinging search engines?

5 September 2010 - 5/09/2010

If you heard others talking about pinging a search engine and you wondered what is this "pinging" thing about and how does it help your website, here are a few things that can make everything clear for you.

Pinging search engines helps your website a lot.

Once your sitemap is updated search engines should know about this. By pinging search engines you tell them that your sitemap has changed and new pages are available. This action will help search engines discover and index more of your website's pages, which is a great thing for your website. The more pages are indexed, the more potential visitors your website may have.

How to ping search engines?

Supposing sitemap.xml is the name of your sitemap and it's located in the root of your website, here are some ping commands for the major search engines.

To ping Google.com:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

To ping Yahoo.com:
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?url=http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

To ping Ask.com:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

To ping Msn.com:
http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

To ping MoreOver.com:
http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.numesite.ro/sitemap.xml

You can use this commands in your browser, or you can automate the process by doing a script to ping search engines which is executed every time your sitemap has changed.

How often should I ping a search engine?

The search engines pinging can be executed anytime you want, but is recommended to do it only when your website's sitemap is changed. If you ping search engines and you have nothing new into your sitemap, the only thing you obtain is more traffic on your server made by the crawlers and slower performances for your website's speed.

Can pinging do any harm to my SEO if it's to often used?

From experts view "over pinging" search engines can't do any harm to your SEO. What search engines think about this in totally unknown. Making search engines come to your website all the time when you have nothing new for them, may be considered as an abusive behavior from your part. That's why as we said before, it's recommended to ping search engines only when your sitemap has something new.

Pinging search engines have no guarantee that search engines will come to your website to check your sitemap.

5 September 2010 - 5/09/2010

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