ASK XML Sitemap Submission
For those of you who don’t know about XML sitemaps for your website please read my XML Sitemap Guide to learn how to create and manage your sitemaps. Google and Yahoo have webmaster tools for you to upload and manage your sitemaps. Live search will have a similar portal pretty soon. If you haven’t heard about it, read my post Live Search New Webmaster Portal in Beta for more info.
That will take care of the top 3 major engines, but what about ASK? I get 10% of my traffic from ASK and it is due to the fact that I ping them with my sitemap whenever I change the site. No they don’t have a webmaster center, but you can submit sitemaps to ASK one of 2 ways:
- Through the robots.txt file – Once you have prepared the sitemap, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to robots.txt as follows: SITEMAP: http://www.the-URL-of-your-sitemap-here.xml. The sitemap location should be the full sitemap URL. Read my post Search Engine Optimization: Robots.txt for more info.
- Alternatively, you can also submit your sitemap through the ping URL: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.the-URL-of-your-sitemap-here.xml. My article on Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing has a great overview of XML-RPC.
Make sure you follow the sitemap guidelines at sitemap.org when preparing your sitemap.
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