Business Magazine

Index a Sitemap

Posted on the 27 April 2017 by Matt Jackson @MattJacksonUk1

The mainstream understanding is that there are only two ways to index your website in Google, via a sitemap submission, or a Fetch as Google request (both found in the Google Search Console, after you have verified your website).

However there is actually a third, lesser known way to index your web pages, which is useful if you do not want to (or cannot) submit your domain name into the Search Console.

Yes you can ping the Google bot to notify them that you're sitemap has been updated, and that they should crawl your new pages.

First you will need your sitemap url, for example this site has the sitemap url of:

http://blog.matt-jackson.com/sitemap_index.xml

Next you will need to add that to the following url to notify Google of your sitemaps location:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=

So the full url together in this site example is:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://blog.matt-jackson.com/sitemap_index.xml

And if you visit this url you will see the following message:

Sitemap Notification Received

Your Sitemap has been successfully added to our list of Sitemaps to crawl. If this is the first time you are notifying Google about this Sitemap, please add it via http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ so you can track its status. Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

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