I know of Google and Bing, but are there other places I can/should submit my sitemap.xml? And do they support pinging?
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1 Answer
Outside of signing up for the various web master tools accounts, Bing, Google, Baidu, et. al., the robots.txt file can be used to generally announce the existence of a sitemap file. You use the following example in your robots.txt file which is possibly the best way to get the various search engines (generally speaking) to use your sitemap.
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
Some sites have a ping utility such as Bing and Google.
I have not seen any evidence that ping for Bing (poet and don't know it) works and the Google ping assumes a web master tools account. Somehow, I think the various ping utilities have fallen out of favor over the years.
Of course, I strongly recommend signing up for webmaster tools account for Bing, Google, and possibly Baidu but Baidu seems to weird about using sitemaps. Having a web master tools account does encourage these search engines to use your sitemap. For Google, creating a Google Search page ensures that your sitemap is read and the whole site spidered immediately and very fast.
answered Apr 29, 2014 at 15:29
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3Not according to: stackoverflow.com/questions/14196801/sitemap-url-in-robots-txt Commented Apr 29, 2014 at 16:36
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Yes, relative sitemap URLs are not allowed "officially", however there is a comment from John Mueller on this Webmasters answer that suggests that Google does allow it. Although the following comment suggests that GWT throws a warning (?)– MrWhiteCommented Apr 29, 2014 at 22:18
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Honestly, since I seem to be a creature of habit (and a bit of the absent minded professor), I can remember that there was a good reason why I used the full URL in my sitemaps, but I could not remember why. And since I could not remember, I looked for the answer. Thanks for the info. Commented Apr 29, 2014 at 22:24