News about Sitemaps Ping Endpoint Deprecation
On Monday, June 26th, Google made a significant announcement regarding the Sitemaps Protocol, a tool that has been assisting search engines in discovering new URLs and scheduling crawls of already known URLs since 2005. The announcement revealed that the sitemaps “ping” endpoint, a feature of this widely utilized protocol, will be deprecated within the next six months.
What are Sitemaps
To repeat some of our previous posts, Google defines a sitemap as “a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, as well as the relationships between them.” (Google: Find out more about sitemaps.)
When you submit a sitemap, search engines may crawl your site more efficiently.
A sitemap will offer search engines crucial information such as:
When was a URL last updated?
How frequently are modifications made to a page?
The importance of a page in relation to other pages on your website.
This data assists search engines in finding, crawling, and indexing the web pages on your site. Sitemaps can be generated in an XML file, the most often used method. Some content management systems have capabilities that make it simple to create sitemaps.
Below is an example of a simple sitemap with all possible elements sourced from Dream Warrior Group‘s site.
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>https://dreamwarrior.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2023-06-28T00:00:00-07:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Understanding the Sitemap Ping
The sitemap protocol provides an unauthenticated REST method for sending sitemaps to search engines. However, subsequent internal Google and other search engine research have revealed that these unauthenticated sitemap submissions are no longer helpful. In the instance of Google Search, most of these submissions have been detected as spam. As a result, Google has chosen to remove sitemaps ping support. The deprecated REST API will stop working in six months, and any pings to it will result in a 404 error, and using the endpoint will no longer be useful.
The end of the sitemap pinging doesn’t mean that your sitemaps are useless; if you are utilizing robots.txt or regularly pushing your sitemap to the Google search console, you should experience no issues.
The Role of the Lastmod Element
The utility of the last mod feature, which indicates the latest modification date of a webpage, has fluctuated throughout time. However, it has recently become more impactful in a variety of situations, and Google now uses it as a signal for scheduling crawls to previously identified URLs.
To serve its purpose, the last mod element must be in a supported date format, as stated on sitemaps.org. Once you upload your sitemap, Google’s Search Console will alert you if it is not. Furthermore, it should accurately reflect the actual modification dates: if a page was last amended seven years ago, but the last mod element indicates that it was modified yesterday, Google will eventually discard the last mod dates provided.
You can apply the last mod element to all or just a subset of the pages in your sitemap. Because these sites frequently aggregate content from other pages on the site, some site software may need help to detect the last modification date of the homepage or a category page. In such circumstances, omitting the last model for these pages is appropriate.
It is critical to understand that “last modification” refers to “last significant modification.” Minor changes, such as changing the text in the sidebar or footer, do not warrant an update to the last mod value. Only if there are significant modifications to the primary text, structured data, or links you should change the last mod value.
Changefreq and Priority Elements
Google does not utilize the change freq or priority elements. The change freq element overlaps conceptually with last mod, while the priority element, a highly subjective field, often fails to accurately represent the actual priority of a page relative to other pages on a site based on Google’s internal studies. For further information on sitemaps, please review SITEMAP.ORG.
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