Sitemaps are a great way to let search engines crawl through all the pages of your website so that they can be included in the search results. A sitemap allows a webmaster to add the urls of a website in a certain format with additional details such as updated date, images etc. This sitemap is then submitted to search engines so that the detail information about urls can be provided to them.
Google allows webmasters to submit sitemaps of their website via the Webmasters Tools. The sitemaps are crawled automatically time to time after certain intervals. This allows discovery of updated links and new links in the sitemap.
Now, what we want to achieve is tell Google that our sitemap has updated right after we add new content to our website and make the respective changes to the sitemap. One can always login to Webmasters Tools by Google, go to the sitemaps submitting page, select the sitemap and click on resubmit. But this method is a bit long considering the fact that websites tend to be updated frequently. Repeating this method from time to time will not be an efficient way to submit sitemaps.
While there are automatic scripts built in websites powered by popular scripts such as WordPress that pings Google every time a sitemap is updated, we can even do it manually.
The way to ping Google when we have new Urls added in our sitemap is by opening the following url: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=
For example:
This site has a site map at http://www.howtofan.com/sitemap.xml
After new posts and update in sitemap, opening the following url in the browser would ping Google with newest urls in the sitemap
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.howtofan.com/sitemap.xml
A confirmation is displayed after the above url is opened saying that the notification has been received.
This would notify Google telling it that our sitemap has updated. While I do not think that it is absolutely necessary every time you update your website, I think one can do this when a website is new and wants to notify the search engines about new contents.
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