submitting sitemaps to search engines

Webmaster Discussion
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#1

do you submit sitemaps? i brought this up before and some said it wasn’t worth it, but when i see google picking up my new pages so quickly, i think it is - even if it isn’t the big deal it used to be.

you can have a sitemap for any domain of up to 500 pages created free in a few minutes at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php - download the uncompressed xml version, upload it to the root domain it’s for - in public html. then you can submit it.

you can submit it at google:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard

at yahoo:
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

at msn - you can use your hotmail or msn messenger account to log in:
http://webmaster.live.com/

for the 3 above, you’ll need to verify that you’re the site owner, usually by uploading a page as they tell you and clicking that it’s up.

and you can submit your sitemap to ask.com by plugging your domain into the below, putting it into your browser and clicking.
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
not sure what kinds of sites ask takes, but i did find porn there.

anyway, sitemaps may not be as exciting as they used to be, but it still couldn’t hurt to keep the search engines up with your pages.

#2

Re: submitting sitemaps to search engines

Wow, it didn’t even dawn on me to submit my sitemaps to these other engines. Makes perfect sense. I’ve always only dealt with Google.

Thanks Basschick!

#3

Re: submitting sitemaps to search engines

For blogs, there are some good plugins that let you submit to MSN, Yahoo, along with Google, and can’t recall, but I think a couple of other lesser ones.

#4

Re: submitting sitemaps to search engines

This is the official Sitemap generator. Its very good once you get the hang of it:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html

#5

Re: submitting sitemaps to search engines

wow very nice info here on this, i am for sure going to be checking this out thank you much

#6

Re: submitting sitemaps to search engines

this is something I am anal about on my blogs, but just never thought about for a regular site, looks like my next project.

#7

Re: submitting sitemaps to search engines

don’t know that it’s really a project - it takes a max of 30 minutes to do them all - 5 minutes to generate the sitemap, and maybe 5 minutes for each of the first 3 search engines and 10 seconds for the last one :wink:

#8

Re: submitting sitemaps to search engines

Project was just a figure of speech, I meant fit it in my schedule

#9

Re: submitting sitemaps to search engines

and come to think of it, if you have 25 or more domains, it could become a bit of a project…

#10

Re: submitting sitemaps to search engines

I’ve been submitting my new blogs’ sitemaps to Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live when I do my link trade submissions, and I’ve been getting search engine hits quickly. (Also, sometimes I get SE hits before a blog is even publicly launched or sent to a ping site, go figure!)

#11

Re: submitting sitemaps to search engines

10 days after submitting our sitemap to ask.com i was happy to see a couple of our pages listed. and now it’s a few hours later and we’re gone again.

go figure!