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So I've pinged Google with my site XML sitemap with this HTTP request:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://example.com/sitemap.xml

The response was OK "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."

However if I login to Google webmasters tools I see the emptiness in the Sitemap files section:

I should make a note that I pinged Google firs time just about two days ago. The second note is that shortly after the ping (several hours or so) the first page of my site appears in the Google search results (it is root page, which is not in the sitemap by the way).

So the question is: should I keep waiting or I need to add XML-sitemap file to Google webmasters tools manually?

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Yes you have to add it manually in search console, because ping tool is available for anyone, it means me and you can also submit stackexchange sitemap to Google ping tool, and they will not going to check weather you own the domain or not.

So that ping tool does not gives you any index data, neither they automatically add your sitemap into search console. You have to verify your property in search console and add the sitemap manually.

But if you just want to index your website without checking the index data and errors as you said in comment, then feel free to use ping tool, Google support it very well, here is official statements.

You can also resubmit a sitemap by sending an HTTP GET request to the following URL, specifying your own sitemap URL: http://google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/my_sitemap.xml

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  • However it could be easily tested that the ping was from the same IP as the web server IP. So: is that correct that "pinged" sitemap meaning almost nothing for Google?
    – Roman Matveev
    Jan 16, 2017 at 10:16
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    When you do sitemap ping to Google, or your robots.txt include sitemap link, then Google will simply store that information and use it for future crawling, but the thing is that, if you want to see the index data and errors, then you have to add your sitemap manually. Google will not going to add your sitemap automatically into search console, but still they will use it internally and will crawl your site.
    – Goyllo
    Jan 16, 2017 at 11:17
  • So, theoretically if I need just indexing (and I can skip error tracking and other useful information) it is enough to add a sitemap with GET ping. Right?
    – Roman Matveev
    Jan 16, 2017 at 11:25
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    Yeah, here is official statements - You can also resubmit a sitemap by sending an HTTP GET request to the following URL, specifying your own sitemap URL:http://google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/my_sitemap.xml
    – Goyllo
    Jan 16, 2017 at 12:58
  • Thank you, Goyllo! Could you add these information to your answer? I will accept one.
    – Roman Matveev
    Jan 16, 2017 at 13:31

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