Ping Bing
Bing is Microsoft’s newly branded and revamped search engine that is gaining popularity and market share every day since its recent launch. It’s well known that Bing takes a long time to initially index a website, so ping their service when you launch a website and every time you update content. Their ping service is http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your sitemap web address]. In my case this would be: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.bluefalconmarketing.com/sitemap.xml You can manually ping Bing by entering the above url in a web browser and pressing enter. I prefer to automate this process, by entering the url into a ping list in WordPress. WordPress will then automatically ping Bing each time I update or submit a new post.Ping Google
Google is the dominant search engine, and you will want to inform when something new or changes appears on your site. The ping url is http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap-file.xml, in my case it would be http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.bluefalconmarketing.com/sitemap.xml Again, you can manually visit this url to ping Google, or add the url to an automated pinging service if this is supported by your website development platform.Ping Yahoo
Yahoo’s ping service lets you notify them anytime your site changes so their index can be updated quicker. Their ping url is http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml, in my case this would be http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.bluefalconmarketing/sitemap.xml You can automatically submit your updated site map using a pinging service or manually entering the above url. If you don’t have an xml sitemap yet, you can use a free xml sitemap generator to get you started.What search engines do you ping to? What blog search services do you ping to? Do you see xml sitemap pinging as useful to your website?