Quick Submit Sitemaps
Now that your Sitemap is created, it’s time to submit it to the major search engines. There are a couple of ways to do this for the three top search engines. You can basically ping the major search engines or open a Webmaster account.
In this step, we will do a quick submit to Ask, Google, Yahoo, and Live/MSN Search. Please note that Ask.com does not offer a Webmaster account, so pinging Ask is a must.
To ping and notify the search engines of your Sitemap file, you must add your complete Sitemap URL after the “=” and go to that URL in your Web Browser. Each search engine will notify you whether the ping was successful or not.
Ask
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=
Google
http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=
Yahoo
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&url=http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=
Live/MSN Search
http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=
While this is a quick way to let the search engines know about your Sitemap file, there is no replacement for more detailed information. For this reason, the next part of this series will cover creating Webmaster accounts at Google, Yahoo, and Live/MSN. To continue and create a Google Webmaster account, click here. To bypass the creation of Webmaster accounts, click here.
