We all know how important backlinks are and getting your pages indexed but did you know there’s a little trick you can do to get Google, Bing or any search engine for that matter to read your sitemap without having to open a webmasters account with them?
Yes? Well don’t bother reading on you’re not going to find anything you don’t already know!
No? Well, let me show you what I found.
Right, I have been doing some research around robots.txt and sitemaps when I came upon some info on sitemaps.org. They where describing how you can put a sitemap link into your robots.txt file like so:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
It is independent of the user-agents line so can go at the top or the bottom, you can also have more than one so:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml
Are completely valid but what I found more interesting was that you can ‘ping’ a search engine with your sitemap, normally you would need to have a webmasters account, verify your domain and then submit the sitemap.
However, it is possible to submit that sitemap WITHOUT having to create an account. I have played about with it a little and works perfectly fine with Bing and Google however not so well with Yahoo and Ask, I’ll look into those a little more see if there is another way maybe?
But for now, you can use this to ‘ping’ Google and Bing with your sitemaps, ideal for PBN’s or anything you don’t really want a full-blown webmasters account for.
Just change the yourdomain.com to errr your domain of course!http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Oh and obviously you’ll need to have a sitemap at that location.
Update: Seems ask.com have retired the submission and rely solely on spiders!