How to Get Your Sitemap Indexed Sooner Using Sitemap.XML Pinging

What is Pinging and Why Is It Helpful?

Pinging is the process of notifying search engines and other web services that new content has been published on a website. This is done by sending a request to a specific URL or Web Service by alerting them that there has been a change in content and hence informing them of the new update.

When Search Engines receive a Ping they know exactly where to send their crawlers to crawl and index the freshly updated content. Pinging is a highly effective way to make sure that its site is indexed faster or at least crawled faster.

Also, pinging allows the Website to increase the visibility of its backlinks. When a site pings a search engine with new backlinks, the search engines are made aware that the site is linking to a new piece of content and hence this may boost the credibility of both the main website and the content that it is pinging too.

Overall pinging is a really important tool for SEO professionals and webmasters as it allows them to faster index their websites by Search Engines.

Why you Should Ping Your Sitemap?

Sitemap is a file that stores information about all your webpages on your website and gives information about their relevance, priority and their last update time.

• Pinging your sitemap helps in alerting the search engines of the recent update to your web pages and helps in faster indexing and crawling of your newly changed website or specific web pages.
• Also pinging a sitemap also helps to discover potential structural issues with a website that may prevent search engines from crawling or indexing your site. This may include non-indexable URLs, duplicate Pages, Canonicalised URLs, broken links etc.

How Often You Should Ping Your Sitemap?

The Frequency by which you should Ping your sitemap depends solely upon how often the site content is updated. It is a good practice to ping your sitemap once whenever a significant number of pages have been updated. 

For example, if you add new pages or blog posts to your website on a daily or weekly basis, pinging your sitemap more frequently, such as every day or every few days, may be appropriate. If your website is updated less frequently, such as once a month, pinging your sitemap less frequently, such as every few weeks or once a month, may be appropriate.

It’s also worth mentioning that most search engines check for sitemap updates on a regular basis, so you don’t have to ping it every time you make a change. Pinging your sitemap, on the other hand, can help to speed up the indexing process and ensure that search engines are informed of any revisions as soon as possible.

Finally, the frequency with which you should ping your sitemap will be determined by the specific qualities of your website and the frequency with which its material is updated.

What is the Syntax and Procedure to Successfully Ping your Sitemap?

We perform the above activity on our Website: thatware.co

Step 1: 

We first obtain the most important Sitemap URLs

Step 2: We then ping each sitemap using the following syntax:

google.com/ping?sitemap=<sitemap url>

For example, We put the following URL in Google: google.com/ping?sitemap=https://thatware.co/sitmap-misc.xml

And we obtain the following result: 

The same procedure is applied to all the Sitemap URLs and eventually, Google receives a notification every time a Sitemap is updated.

Source: How to Get Your Sitemap Indexed Sooner Using Sitemap.XML Pinging (thatware.co)