Last week, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & Ask.com To All Support Sitemaps Autodiscovery. So how do you ping these services to notify the search engines of an update to your Sitemaps, if you do not want to wait for them to find it themselves?
Softplus at Cre8asite Forums posted the URLs you can use to ping the various engines. Here they are:
Ask.com: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http:%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml Yahoo: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
I did not test these myself, but they seem accurate.
Note, there is no URL listed for Microsoft's Live search. Why? I suspect they currently do not support Sitemaps. Which brings me back to my lingering question, Is Microsoft's Live Search Ever Going to Add Sitemaps Support? They have been promising it since November 15, 2006.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.