How To Manually Ping Google For Sitemap Update, Auto Index & Website Submission

You probably want to know how to ping Google manually after you update your blog(s) or add a new post.

Though Google Search Console/Webmaster tools contains a tool called URL submission where you are able to submit new URL's of your website that Google may not have crawled previously, the process is tedious as you would need to copy every URL, open webmaster tools, navigate to URL submission, paste the link and wait for your request to be processed before adding another link.

That becomes really cumbersome if you have tens or hundreds of URL for submission.

Why would you want to submit URLs to Google when you could just add your sitemap to search console through which Google could crawl and understand your website.

URL submission is a priority request. This is necessary when you do not want to wait for Google bots but need the update to be indexed as soon as possible.

For instance, when you add a new post such as a time based post such as a news item, you need it indexed as soon as possible so that searchers can have access to the new content you've added to your blog. Similarly, if you updated an important page on your website, you need this to appear in SERP as soon as possible.

For those using Content Management Systems like WordPress, there are plugins available to do this automatically if they are correctly set up. This also demands that you have previously added and verified your website in Google Search Console. If your website is large, you need to add your sitemaps so that google can easily find all your content.

With the manual pinging for auto index and sitemap update, you don't need any of this since the pinging process already has the sitemap address in the pinging URL. Similarly, this process does not require that you've previously submitted/verified your website in Google Search Console. It is suitable for busy websites that publish a good number of posts in a day, as all you need to do when you add a post, is just to refresh the page containing the pinging URL.

Now to get started, you need to add your website URL and sitemap to this URL below:

https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemaps.xml/

All you need to to do, is to replace 'example.com/sitemaps.xml with your actual web URL and sitemap.

For most websites, their sitemap URL ends in 'sitemaps.xml'. So if your website address is www.example.com, your sitemap address could be https://www.example.com/sitemaps.xml.

This is not true for every website. Some plugins like Yoast SEO may change your original sitemap address. If you are using Yoast SEO, your sitemap address should be located at https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml

If you are on WordPress, the default sitemap location is at /wp_sitemap.xml.

To check the location of your sitemap, you can try appending any of these addresses to your website URL to see it the sitemaps are located at that URL.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions. Do not forget to also share this post with your friends, colleagues and loved ones.