Submitting your sitemap

Now we turn to the active submission of your site map to the major
search engines (the modern equivalent of old-fashioned search engine
submission). Over time, all the search engines will move toward the
Sitemaps.org standard for submission, which is to use a ping URL sub-
mission syntax. Basically this means you give your sitemap address to64 64 Courting the crawl
the search engine and request it to send out a short burst of data and
"listen" for a reply, like the echo on a submarine sonar search.
At time of writing, I only recommend using this method for
Ask.com. Amend the following to add the full URL path to your sitemap
file, copy it into your browser URL bar, and hit return:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com
/sitemap.xml
Ask.com will present you with a reassuring confirmation page, then
crawl your sitemap file shortly thereafter.
MSN has yet to implement a formal interface for sitemap submis-
sion. To monitor the situation, visit the LiveSearch official blog (at
http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch) where future improvements are likely
to be communicated. However, for the time being I recommend under-
taking two steps to ensure that MSN indexes your site:
G Reference your sitemap in your robots.txt file (see above).
G Ping Moreover using http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://
yourdomain.com/yoursitemap.xml.
Moreover.com is the official provider of RSS feeds to the myMSN por-
tal, so I always work on the (probably erroneous) theory that submis-
sion to Moreover may somehow feed into the main MSN index
somewhere down the track. (RSS is sometimes called Really Simple
Syndication and supplies "feeds" on request from a particular site, usu-
ally a news site or a blog, to a news reader on your desktop, such as
Google Reader.)
Both Google (which originally developed the XML schema for
sitemaps) and Yahoo! offer dedicated tools to webmasters, which
include both the verification of site ownership and submission of
sitemaps:Get to the top on Google 65
G Google Webmaster Tools: www.google.com/webmasters.
G Yahoo! Site Explorer: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites.
To use Google Webmaster Tools, you must first obtain a Google
account (something I cover in more detail in the section on Adwords,
page 187). You then log in, click on "My Account," and follow the link
to Webmaster Tools. Next, you need tell Google all the sites you own
and begin the verification process. Put the URL of your site (e.g.,
http://www.yourdomain.com) into the Add Sites box and hit return.
Google presents you with a page containing a "next step" to verify your
site. Click on the Verify Site link and choose the "Add a Metatag"
option. Google presents you with a unique meta tag, in the following
format:
<meta name="verify-v1" content="uniquecode=" />
Edit your site and add the verification meta tag between the head tags
on your homepage. Tab back to Google and click on the Verify button
to complete the process. Now you can add your sitemap by clicking on
the sitemap column link next to your site. Choose the "Add General
SiteMap" option and complete the sitemap URL using the input box.
You're all done!
Yahoo! follows a similar approach to Google on Yahoo! Site
Explorer. Sign up, sign in, add a site, and click on the verification but-
ton. With Yahoo! you need to upload a verification key file (in HTML
format) to the root directory of your web server. Then you can return to
Site Explorer and tell Yahoo! to start authentication. This takes up to 24
hours. At the same time you can also add your sitemap by clicking on
the "Manage" button and adding the sitemap as a feed