Submit Your Blog’s Sitemap to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask

If you had read my article,5 Tips for Newbie Bloggers, the last tip was to submit your sitemap to major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com. But what’s the benefit? Well if your site is relatively young or new, it may take time for search engines to crawl your site and display your sites in search results. Submitting your sitemaps is one method of hurrying this process. So read on.

The process of submitting your sitemap is quite simple. If you are a blogger user (blogger.com) the link to your sitemap would be your-blog-address.blogspotcom/atom.xml. For eg http://myfreehouse.blogspot.com/atom.xml

But theres one problem here. A standard sitemap must contain all the links in your blog. However if your blog is hosted on blogger, your sitemap will contain only the 26 most recent posts. But there is a simple workaround to this.

Suppose that your blog (taking an eg. myfreehouse.blogpsot.com) contains 200 posts. So for the first 100 you can use http://myfreehouse.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100

For the next 100 you can use http://myfreehouse.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=100&max-results=200 and son on.

If you are a wordpress user you can just install the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress. Your sitemap will be auto-generated at your-blog-address.com/sitemap.xml. For eg. http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml

Submitting your sitemaps:

So now to the main part Submitting your sitemaps. Just follow the following steps. Remember to replace the text in red with your sitemap’s address:

• Google

  You can follow this tutorial to submit your sitemap to Google.

• Yahoo

  1. http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&url=http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml
  2. http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml

• Bing

  1. http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml
  2. http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml

• Ask

  http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml

If submit your sitempas to the major search engines, it is more likely that they will crawl your website more quickly. So do it! Hope you liked this tutorial. More to follow!