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How to submit sitemaps to Google / Yahoo on posting?

Google Sitemap HTTP Ping

This post talks about how to submit site map of your blog/site automatically to Google/Yahoo on posting the content every time. The normal process is to submit your sitemap in Google Webmaster tools, but the shortcoming is that Google picks the site maps on regular interval once in a day or so, but If you are updating content several times within a day then you might need to submit/update your sitemaps every time.

The process of sending sitemap updates to Google / Yahoo / other search engines is called HTTP Ping for sitemaps.

For Google below is the process of sitemap HTTP ping.

Build the following url say if
your website name is : http://www.mysite.com and

your sitemap url is http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml then the following is the url you need to build for sitemap

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Since we are sending the GET request we need to do a URLEncode of  the your sitemap url.

This can be achieved through following method UrlEncode  in PHP and Encode in Java or you can use free encoders available online to encode the sitemp url one time.

When I did encode of the above http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml  this is what I got    

So our final url is

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysite.com%2Fsitemap.xml

send the request using wget or curl or any class of your choice.

If you get back HTTP 200 response then its a success else try it again. Google says you can send updates eevrytime you update/add content to your site  and it can be upto every hour. So this will help you boost the updated nature of your content in Google search engine. 

 

Yahoo Sitemap HTTP ping

Same approach works with Yahoo but in case of yahoo You need to get a App Id  from yahoo services

First Get App Id  =  http://developer.yahoo.com/wsregapp/ 

use the appId in below url as I have mentioned earlier encode your sitemap  url and add it like 

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=AppId&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysite.com%2Fsitemap.xml

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Google pulls April Fool pranks on users..

Google in maintaining its custom of pulling a april first special every year did tricks across all its line of Products.Im listing few of them for Gmail,Google,Orkut and Calendar.

Virgle (Virgin + Google)

Google wants to take you to Mars for Free.You can become a part of first settlement in Mars.

Gmail (Custom time)

Gmail lets you set custom time for your Mails..so you can cheat your Boss 😉

 Check Yogurt Logo ..sorry Orkut Logo

Google calendar entries ??

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How good is googlebot?

I was going for a walk here in OHIO and found a shop with words “This shop is powered by Google search”, Its a real estate company which occupies top spot in Google’s rankings. It now brings us to the question why should someone display such a banner in front of their shop? Is it advertisement for Google ? or Is it a fashion? I think its more to do with  gratitude.

There are too many companies in the web world which rely solely on Google search and Google adsense programs.Many websites might fall if Google decides to take them for a ride(I know they won’t 🙂 ). “Every possible site exists in Google search database” and you can reframe the sentence “A site exists only if it is in Google search”, that is how much Google has control over the search engine market.

Its not the control and market dominance which fascinates me, rather its the perfection or finesse with which it accomplishes the task.Over the last few years I have been involved with Googlebot (my favorite word is the google serpent) in many ways.It has taken nearly 2-3 years for me to understand the efficiency and presence of googlebot.Its fast,it crawls every thing and it punishes harshly whenever junk is thrown at it.

Sometime back when the SEO comapnies started out spreading their wings everybody was wondering whether SEO’s will rule the roost.But Googlebot proved them wrong pretty soon, any tactic to get a better rank had improvements in the short term but the cost? Many sites were blocked/punished, they were simply thrown to last pages of search results.

So how good and how receptive is googlebot ? I did a little research on one of my site(or rather a mistake), I tried to pass some keywords which will give me a better ad revenues, though the keywords were not totally off topic for my site but they were itly for content not present in my site. Within a few days my site’s search visitors reduced, and to my astonishment(shock) site appeared exactly in 41/42 nd position for the same keyword which I had first five places in search rankings earlier.

So is it the -40 filter? I guess so and it responded pretty quickly for my liking.It responded pretty fast to my keyword seeding / keyword spawning and the punishment was harsh as well, I lost nearly 80% of my site visitors thanks to the fourth page result. If Google had banned my site or applied -5000 filter or something my site would have become extinct in a day.

Once I removed the keywords it took my site to regain the top spot within  a week or two. I should feel pretty lucky to have regained my spot in search rankings.And the search ranking was regained mainly by referrals, which makes us to have a look at reffering sites.

Some people call it Authority sites, if a Site say Hindu.com refers my site for certain Indian news articles my site’s ranking will increase, thats because Hindu.com is the top authority site for Indian news. In my case the sites fighting for my keyword also were mine and since they were referring to my first site, it didn take long for me to get back to top spot.But a year back similar misadventure led to closure of my news site, by now I know how to work with googlebot, Dont try to be over smart with googlebot, If your site is really worth it will get a good rank else you will be punished.

I will update more filters and the Google sandbox in a few days. Signup for receiving articles from  this site.